https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24497
--- Comment #5 from Rosanne DiMesio dimesio@earthlink.net --- The problem is not that it's too easy to add distributions; the problem is a combination of bug 27378 and some design decisions that make user errors likely.
Bug 27378 was the reason for the distributions being added without test reports. Back then, if the maintainer or admin corrected the distro, the test report was corrected, but the distro was added to the database anyway, without any test reports attached. Something changed that in the past 7 years, and now the test reports are added with the incorrect distro information, along with the distro being added to the database. To my mind that's worse, because now the admin has to move the test data to another distro before the invalid or duplicate one can be deleted. I have a fix for the latter, but so far haven't figured out how to solve the original problem reported in that bug.
As to design decisions, the first problem is the word distribution itself. That's a Linuxism that makes no sense for other operating systems, and many new Linux users don't understand what it means either. One of the most common errors I see is adding the name of a distributor to the distribution field.
The page layout exacerbates the problem: the box to add a distro is at the bottom of the page, separated by several other fields from the dropdown list. It's not obvious the two are connected, and to a user who doesn't understand what a distribution is in the first place, the text boxes at the bottom are just another field to fill out. It's quite possible that some of these errors have been from users who selected a distro from the list and added something at the bottom: the AppDB will favor the contents of the textboxes over selections from the dropdown list.
Changing the terminology from distribution to operating system would help some; that's the easiest part. Making the AppDB favor the dropdown list over the textboxes would also help, but is harder to accomplish (supposedly that problem was fixed back in 2006 by commit b587dbfd172172ff992ef84b7c3e923c29504e71).
The final thing that would make some difference is simply allowing the various *buntu flavors to have their own listings instead of insisting they all be listed under Ubuntu. There are differences between the flavors that could affect Wine, and we're actually very inconsistent in that policy: Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, but we allow them a separate listing.