An idea for the appdb

[James Mckenzie]

-----Original Message-----
>From: alex at centroidcafe.com
>Sent: Feb 11, 2009 10:59 AM
>To: wine-devel at winehq.org
>Subject: Re: An idea for the appdb
>
>Sorry .. forgot to reply all.
>
>Automatic submission of test data could be a very handy tool. Scenario:
>User A tries to run an application, it crashes due to bugs in Wine. User A
>elects to submit data. Sometime in the future, User B tries to run the same
>application under a similar configuration. It crashes also, but User B
>being a sly user figures out what DLL overrides, patches, etc. allow this
>app to progress past the original crash point. Wine detects this and
>collects the information. Now when User C tries to run this app, Wine
>displays a message like: "This application has been known to fail under the
>current configuration. However, workarounds have been discovered that may
>yield greater success. <link to AppDB>"
>
This would be great, but as previously discussed, who would maintain this information
and verify it is correct and proper?  Although some features would be 'neet to have' 
it is best to leave them on the drawing board for now and work on the various bugs 
that require workarounds.  This is because of two limited resources:  People and Time.
If you have the skills to implement this feature, go ahead and try on a limited database
on your home system.  You would quickly see that we have about 10,000 applications 
in the AppDB and there are many versions of Wine.  This gives you some starting point
of the size of this task.  Supporting a few applications would lead to the 'why isn't
my wiz-bang application there' and a great deal of discussion, wasting more resources.

Of course, if you could produce something that would emulate the "Report to ...."
functionality that is in popular use, that would help keep the AppDB and Bugzilla
up to date as long as a search capability were added to sweep these systems for 
pre-existing entries related to the current problem.

Just my opinion, but this project is not worth attempting at this point.

James McKenzie