An idea for the appdb

[Luke Benstead]

2009/2/11 Matt 'Murph' Finnicum <mattfinn at gmail.com>:
> 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
>
>
>

We'd still need some way to map the exe to the app in the appdb, which
brings us back to my checksum idea. Is there any chance that the appdb
could allow for application checksums to be stored alongside version
entries? Even if nothing is done with the information in the near
future, it could prove useful.

Luke.