Perhaps making a hash based on app name and version in the appdb, and then have wine reading the hash from the app to check against the appdb.

If anyone uses Fedora, their ABRT tool generates hashes for different bugs and then searches their bugzilla before submitting the crash dump, to find if a report is already generated. If the report is already in bugz, then it appends to that bug.We could do something similar, but check against the appdb, and notify the user..

Maybe there could be a separate builtin app (like notepad and explorer) to read the appdb and check ratings, and allow access to the appdb without having to fire up the web browser?

Thanks

Tom


On Thu, Sep 9, 2010 at 2:15 PM, Roderick Colenbrander <thunderbird2k@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Sep 9, 2010 at 6:12 PM, Damjan Jovanovic <damjan.jov@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 9, 2010 at 5:47 PM, Austin English <austinenglish@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Sep 9, 2010 at 8:34 AM, Rosanne DiMesio <dimesio@earthlink.net> wrote:
>>> On Thu, 9 Sep 2010 00:59:32 -0700
>>> Dan Kegel <dank@kegel.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Watching Twitter, one fairly frequently seems people trying
>>>> and failing to run iTunes 10 and the like in Wine.
>>>>
>>>> Should we let them bash their heads against the wall like that?
>>>>
>>>> Maybe we should detect the top ten apps that don't work
>>>> with Wine, and put up a warning dialog saying they are
>>>> known not to work, and people shouldn't try.
>>>> (Kind of like what Windows 7 does when you do something
>>>> dangerous, e.g. try to look at the contents of drive C:.)
>>>>
>>>>
>>> Do you really want to prevent users from ever testing these apps in new versions of Wine, or trying to find workarounds? I do a fair amount of head-bashing myself, and I would find such a message patronizing and intrusive.
>>
>> Agreed. Wine doesn't make efforts to babysit users for most other
>> things, I don't see why this should be any different.
>>
>> Also consider that if such a workaround were to go into wine, that
>> code may long outlive the 'affected apps', and the list would quickly
>> grow out of date.
>>
>> I suppose if a packager wanted to do something like this for their
>> distro I wouldn't complain too much, unless users started asking about
>> it in #winehq/the forums. But this _should not_ go into vanilla wine.
>>
>> --
>> -Austin
>>
>
> The dialog could suggest upgrading Wine, that would prevent the
> affected app list from getting out of date.
>
> Damjan
>
>

If we would want any application database stuff, perhaps appdb would
be the place to store information like this. There should come some
way to extract this information to an XML file or whatever format
periodically. It could be packaged with a wine build or optionally
downloaded when you run Wine or so.

Roderick