Wow! Just when you think a thread had gone into the black hole...<g>
I strongly agree with what both of you have suggested; I particularly
think Francois is correct to suggest that we resolve some of the
hierarchy/name space issues with keywords.
Also, I think it's vital that in addition to a trusted application
database maintainer role, that we also have many people
who can be trusted maintainers for a specific application.
To that end, the apps db should have a web page
element ala source forge.
> So to summarise:
>
> Vendor:
> The name of the vendor
> eg: Microsoft, Borland, iD, ...
> Product Name:
> The most common name of the application including the version
> eg: Word 2000, Paintshop 4, putty, Quicktime 4, ...
> Keywords:
> Alternate manufacturer names
> eg: Activision
> Alternate product names
> eg: Escape from Monkey Island
> Alternate spellings
> eg: Winword
Agree. But I vote we simplify drastically to use just keywords, and
normalize, something like this:
Vendor DB:
Vendor ID
Vendor Name
Vendor URL
Application Family DB:
App ID
App Name
Vendor ID
Keywords
App description (HTML)
App web page (URL, e.g. www.winehq.com/juno)
App Version DB
App ID
App Version ID
Version Name
Keywords
App description (HTML)
Version Web page (URL)
Project ID in the application database
(lets user enter relay trace/static analysis trace to
generate list of APIs used by this app)
(Score data; built nightly)
(Bugzilla list; built nightly)
User Experience DB
App version ID
User comments (HTML)
Test platform (optional)
Wine vintage (optional)
Date entered (so it can expire)
Username (same as bugzilla/API db)
~/.wine/config file used (optional)
Score
Bugzilla bug ids
Keywords DB (autogenerated)
>
> Categories:
> A list of categories the application falls in:
> the current database has a quite good list:
> Office, Network, Graphics, Server, Games, A/V,
> Programming, Hardware, Other
> we could add: Demo and rename A/V to Audio/Video
> Kind:
> What kind of application is this touted as (some may be a
> mixture of 16 and 32bit stuff).
> also from the current database:
> Dos, Win16, Win32, Win32s, WinNT
I would argue, on the KISS principle, that we should delete these
and stick with just keywords.
>
>
> The current database also has:
> Vendor URL:
> An optional URL pointing to the vendor's site
> Product URL:
> An optional URL pointing to the product's page. I contend we may
> want more than one URL here: one for the app itself, one for
> patches/service packs, one to a downloadable version
> Screenshot URL:
> An optional URL pointing to screenshots of that application.
>
> All the above could be part of the application maintainer
> section. Being html this would allow him to format it in a way that
> makes sense for that application and he could add as many URLs as
> necessary.
I vote we condense just to an App description HTML (one field).
We can add helper fields on the entry screens later if wanted.
>
>
> Version:
> Could be part of the name or separate.
IMHO, has to be part of its own record. MS Word 5.0 is very
different from MS Word 7.0.
>
>
> Patch URLs:
> Patches to Wine. Is this ever used?
KISS. First pass shouldn't have it; leave room for it in comments.
>
>
> Windows DLLs Used:
> This should probably be used more. But it's only part of the
> information relevant for running the application. '-desktop' could also
> be relevant, the contents of the .winerc file too, and maybe also
> special manipulations of the registry. It's probably best to leave this
> field out entirely and rely on the application maintainer or the
> application database maintainer to extract all the relevant information,
> in free form, from the users.
I think sending the ~/.wine/config file would be a nice feature to
have, but agree that this should just be free form.
Finally,
<soap box>
I think the biggest problem with the app database is that we get
garbage in, it produces garbage out. I think we should not report
or even use *any* user scores until a trusted app db maintainer
has validated that user experience (and possibly users can become
trusted reporters). Too many people say 'Hey! The main screen
came up! That's a 5! Witness the Slashdot post about MS
Office 2k. (anyone actually try to use Office 2K in Wine to
author a sizable document?).
I think we need to overreact to the problem (a misleading
and crufty apps database) and provide a rigorous,
simple, and scrupulously honest apps db.
</soap box>
Jer
