On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 5:05 PM, Dan Kegel dank@kegel.com wrote:
On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 1:49 PM, Chris Morgan chmorgan@gmail.com wrote:
It seems reasonable to me to include the version bundled with gutsy, even if it's getting old, because gutsy is so popular.
If we wait another 18 days can we ask users of gutsy to upgrade to hardy? ;-)
Of course.
If we ask users to put the wine ubuntu repository in their sources.list file won't that let them continue to keep up with newer releases without much difficulty?
All of your suggestions are along the lines "change the user's behavior" rather than "adapt winehq to the user's behavior". While all your suggestions are fine, they don't change the fact that users are misbehaving because the appdb doesn't allow reports with Gutsy's version of wine.
I'm all for adapting our behavior to better fit with the behavior of our users. I've spent hundreds of hours working on improving the appdb.
If there was a good reason stated to accept results for obsoleted versions then I'd agree with you. In the future I can see a need to pin certain versions to the available versions list, certainly 1.0 seems like a pretty obvious version to pin to the list for a period of time.
There are several issues with keeping older test results. We run the risk of confusing users by showing ratings for Wine releases so old that the current behavior doesn't match. We can hide these older versions but why accept them for submission then? If we show them then we need to consider how to present the ratings so users of newer versions don't get confused with older versions that come with some distributions.
By accepting results for older versions we may not be making the user fully aware that their version is considered to be old.
It's a complex issue that deserves more discussion and may require more php and ui work to present properly to the user.
This problem will keep happening with future releases of Ubuntu if we cut off the version of wine too early, as we do now.
I'm a fan of ubuntu, run it on all of my machines etc but that doesn't automatically mean that test results for older versions are useful. We are rapidly approaching a 1.0 release and each incremental release has a wide range of improvements. A user of Gutsy may find it useful to see test results for 0.9.47 but its likely even more useful for us to help them upgrade to a version we support, currently the latest incremental release.
If we don't plan on releasing new versions based on the release in gutsy, 0.9.47, then I think we've got to consider that version to be obsolete and unsupported.
By your logic, we should not allow any reports against anything but the latest version of wine.
The reason I kept the last several entries on the list was because some people tend to lag behind in their wine versions. Its understandable for us to have a window of versions so we can get reasonably current test results, even if not the most recent test results. Already the list contains a handful of previous releases, several months of obsolete versions.
I agree, we can't always choose the kind of data we get. It's up to us to decide which test results to keep and which ones to discard.
Whatever. I'm tired of discussing this with you. If the appdb maintainers agree with me, they'll make the change. I don't enough to keep arguing.
- Dan
I'm not opposed to a patch that re-adds 0.9.47 version to the list but I'd like to see a patch that adds a table to keep pinned versions and php code to manage this list.
Chris