Hi all! A new GSoC is coming, and i have an idea which can may (or may not) serve as a proposal for a Wine project. Let's speak about it not as an application (so I wouldn't tell a lot about myself) but as an idea for application.
AppDB is an excellent service for helping users dealing with one or another software. Unfortunately, currently i see several problems, which decrease it's efficiency: 1) there are tons of successful (or maybe not successful) reports, which were not submitted to AppDB. People are too lazy to fill many forms. A lot of users will just go away instead of filling report about application. 2) often in order to run an application you should follow some weird instructions, which sometimes miss some important steps, or require additional research by yourself.
So, let's imagine we have a software which I call "AppDB Assistant" with following functionality: 1) an ability to quickly submit a report about application to AppDB. A lot of data (Wine version, Linux distribution, wine settings) could be obtained automatically. An application information with high probability could be fetched from meta data, stored in EXE file. In general, i see that like after closing an app I see additional screen "Please take a couple of seconds and send feedback about your experience with $SOFTWARE_NAME to AppDB", and buttons "Platinum","Gold", etc. Of course this should be configured via winecfg (if user do not want to obtain such data) 2) an ability to generate a "configuration guide" - in this mode an "expert user" selects important data to be included into a guide (for example that app runs _only_ under Windows XP emulation, an important registry values etc.). As a result a special file, describing an app-specific configuration of wine is uploaded to appdb 3) an ability to "preconfigure Wine". That means that based on "configuration guide" created on step 2 "AppDB Assistant" can configure wine in one click. If any additional dlls are required a warning message is displayed with possible information where to obtain them.
I see the following benefits on such software: 1) increasing appdb actuality - with a way more data from users we can provide more accurate info; 2) simplified regression testing - for example if user downloaded a "configuration guide" and it didn't work with newer wine - this is a possible regression (decreased chance of human error)
I realize that this is quite a big project, involving a different parts of Wine, but I'll be glad to hear response from community about this idea and which part probably could fit best for GSoC. Feel free to ask any question if something is unclear.
P.S. Sorry for my bad English, it is far away from being my mother tongue.
Best regards, Illya Klymov