The Application Database lets Maintainers Rate how well an application works in Wine by giving it a medal. This rating system is designed to help determine users if the application will be usable for their purposes by giving them a rating based on an "expert's" opinion.
An application gets this rating if it can not be used for the purpose it was designed.
This includes cases where it does not even install, but also cases where it installs and runs but crashes too often, or where core functionality is not usable.
For an application to get this rating it must be possible to install it by carefully setting up the Wine environment. Then it must work well enough for someone to use its core functionality normally.
Setting up the Wine environment for this application may require installing other applications such as DCOM95 or Internet Explorer, or copying a couple native Windows dlls. It may also require tweaking the Wine configuration, typically to add dll overrides forcing Wine to use the native dlls installed by the application or the user, or to force it to not use those. No other tweaks are allowed.
The core functionality of the application must then work correctly. What constitutes the core functionality depends on the application. For document oriented applications such as a word processor, this would include loading, performing basic modifications and saving documents. For network applications this would include connecting to the server and displaying or saving the results. But the import / export functionalities or the mail-merge functionality of a word processor would not be part of the core functionality.
A Silver application is one which requires setting up the Wine environment just right but which then works perfectly.
The rules governing the Wine environment configuration are the same as those for Bronze applications. However, once installed, all of a Silver application's functionality must work perfectly.
An application can be rated as Gold if it installs and runs perfectly "out of the box".
This means it must install and work with a freshly created Wine environment and not require the installation of any other application.