Propability that application X works in wine

[Stefan Dösinger]

Hi,
Beeing asked how it happenes that a comparably small application fails in wine 
while something bigger like office 2003 and half-life 2 works I thought how 
one could mathematically express that some application works in wine.

There seem to be a few factors:

* Some propability that some behavior Y causes a bug in wine. I assume that is 
fixed, perhaps a per-dll value, perhaps not

* Of course the application size. How many different things does the app do. 
The bigger, the more likely it is that something of that fails.

* People often complain that only popular apps work in wine, so the popularity 
of the app seems to be important. This manifests in the fact that bugs hit by 
popular apps are more likely to be fixed first.

Ok, so how do these factors relate? Popularity seems to be the most important, 
but I am not sure how app size and the bug propability relate. Especially the 
bug propability would be interesting I think, as it might be some measure of 
the maturity of wine :-)

Any ideas about that?
Stefan

[Andreas Mohr]

Hi,

On Tue, Oct 24, 2006 at 11:05:10PM +0200, Stefan Dösinger wrote:
> Any ideas about that?

One factor in the probability calculation would be the number of Google hits for
the application name (the more common, the better debugged it must be), i.e.
your popularity factor.

Another one would be measuring the amount of APIs used by the program and its
libraries (use winedump?).

Andreas Mohr

[Robert Lunnon]

On Wednesday 25 October 2006 08:11, Andreas Mohr wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Tue, Oct 24, 2006 at 11:05:10PM +0200, Stefan Dösinger wrote:
> > Any ideas about that?
>
> One factor in the probability calculation would be the number of Google
> hits for the application name (the more common, the better debugged it must
> be), i.e. your popularity factor.
>
> Another one would be measuring the amount of APIs used by the program and
> its libraries (use winedump?).
>
> Andreas Mohr

I don't think this is very relevant. The probability of an application working 
would be related to the API "sets": touched by the application because wine 
doesn't have even coverage of all APIs,   So the Probability that an 
applications API use will work in Wine depends on the product of the 
Probabilities of  encountering an unimplemented call in each API and the 
criticality of that call - eg fatality of the missing functionality

This could actually be computed for a crossection of application to give a 
general prediction, if you knew the frequency of use for each API call in a 
representative population of applications, and the completion status and 
criticality of all the cals in each API (or even just the % complete of the 
API - the problem being that the probability of a call being used isn't the 
same for all entry point in a given API)  - By the way, in general this is 
called FMECA - Failure Modes, Effects and Criticality analysis - look up this 
topic for further ideas.

It'd make a nice University student project.

Bob

[Kai Blin]

On Wednesday 25 October 2006 00:49, Robert Lunnon wrote:
> This could actually be computed for a crossection of application to give a
> general prediction, if you knew the frequency of use for each API call in a
> representative population of applications, and the completion status and
> criticality of all the cals in each API (or even just the % complete of the
> API - the problem being that the probability of a call being used isn't the
> same for all entry point in a given API)  - By the way, in general this is
> called FMECA - Failure Modes, Effects and Criticality analysis - look up
> this topic for further ideas.
>
> It'd make a nice University student project.

IIRC, David Gümbel's company ITOMIG [1] makes this kind of assesments, based 
on technology developed during David's diploma thesis [2]. Unfortunately the 
thesis is in German and the only whitepaper I found is German as well. Still, 
David might be available for some suggestions, he should be reading this 
list. (Also, Stefan should be able to read it ;) )

Cheers,
Kai

[1] http://www.itomig.de/
[2] http://www.itomig.de/uploads/media/Diplomarbeit_ganymede_ITOMIG.pdf

-- 
Kai Blin, <kai Dot blin At gmail Dot com>
WorldForge developer    http://www.worldforge.org/
Wine developer          http://wiki.winehq.org/KaiBlin/
--
Will code for cotton.