An idea for the appdb

[Matt 'Murph' Finnicum]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 2:33 PM,  <alex at centroidcafe.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, 11 Feb 2009 13:03:21 -0700 (GMT-07:00), James Mckenzie
> <jjmckenzie51 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>Automatic submission of test data could be a very handy tool.
>>>
>> 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.
>
> Ten thousand records in a database is not very significant. My day job is
> DBA, so I might have the skills to tackle something like this (at least in
> part).
>
>> 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.
>>
>
> This was what I was thinking. Microsoft does this in Windows, and they are
> the reference implementation of the Wine API. If collecting this data helps
> M$ debug Windows, then I would think it would certainly help Wine too.
>
>> Just my opinion, but this project is not worth attempting at this point.
>>
>
> If that is the consensus, then I won't bother looking into this further.
> However, it seems like there is currently a movement to rework AppDB
> anyway, so why not consider this idea now, so it could be factored into
> those plans?
>
> -Alex
>
>
>
>

Why not just write a external utility (perhaps with a bit of support
from AppDB for mapping exe's to applications) so that a GUI user could
just right click->AppDB and have their browser fire up? That'd be
neat, much less complex, and completely non-invasive.
--Murph