GSoC 2009 Proposal - AppDB Assistant

[Illya Klymov]

Hi all! A new GSoC is coming, and i have an idea which can may (or may 
not) serve as a proposal for a Wine project.
Let's speak about it not as an application (so I wouldn't tell a lot 
about myself) but as an idea for application.

AppDB is an excellent service for helping users dealing with one or 
another software. Unfortunately, currently i see several problems, which 
decrease it's efficiency:
1) there are tons of successful (or maybe not successful) reports, which 
were not submitted to AppDB.
People are too lazy to fill many forms. A lot of users will just go away 
instead of filling report about application.
2) often in order to run an application you should follow some weird 
instructions, which sometimes miss some important steps, or require 
additional research by yourself.

So, let's imagine we have a software which I call "AppDB Assistant" with 
following functionality:
1) an ability to quickly submit a report about application to AppDB. A 
lot of data (Wine version, Linux distribution, wine settings) could be 
obtained automatically. An application information with high probability 
could be fetched from meta data, stored in EXE file. In general, i see 
that like after closing an app I see additional screen "Please take a 
couple of seconds and send feedback about your experience with 
$SOFTWARE_NAME to AppDB", and buttons "Platinum","Gold", etc. Of course 
this should be configured via winecfg (if user do not want to obtain 
such data)
2) an ability to generate a "configuration guide" - in this mode an 
"expert user" selects important data to be included into a guide (for 
example that app runs _only_ under Windows XP emulation, an important 
registry values etc.). As a result a special file, describing an 
app-specific configuration of wine is uploaded to appdb
3) an ability to "preconfigure Wine". That means that based on 
"configuration guide" created on step 2 "AppDB Assistant" can configure 
wine in one click. If any additional dlls are required a warning message 
is displayed with possible information where to obtain them.


I see the following benefits on such software:
1) increasing appdb actuality - with a way more data from users we can 
provide more accurate info;
2) simplified regression testing - for example if user downloaded a 
"configuration guide" and it didn't work with newer wine - this is a 
possible regression (decreased chance of human error)

I realize that this is quite a big project, involving a different parts 
of Wine, but I'll be glad to hear response from community about this 
idea and which part probably could fit best for GSoC. Feel free to ask 
any question if something is unclear.

P.S. Sorry for my bad English, it is far away from being my mother tongue.

Best regards,
Illya Klymov