On Wed, 26 Jan 2005 tony_lambregts@telusplanet.net wrote: [...]
How is that really different than this.
http://appdb.winehq.org/help/?topic=maintainer_ratings
The Maintainer rating system is meant for "supported" applications.
That's the thing. There is no such thing as a 'supported application' in Wine, at least the way I understand 'supported': * there is no garantee a 'supported' application will continue to work in the next version of Wine. That's because Alexandre does not try each 'supported' application to make sure it still works before making a release.
* there's no Wine hacker to fix a 'supported' application if it breaks. Having an application maintainer for each 'supported' application is important and a first step towards making sure it will continue to work. But it's not sufficient. If it breaks it will need a Wine developer to look into it and debug it and I don't see any one proposing to do it or able to garantee this.
* There's no garantee that a Gold application will not regress to Silver, Bronze or even lower.
* And finally I don't see any Wine hacker proposing any specific 'support' for the 'supported' applications.
So these 'supported' applications are no different from any other application and the medals mean nothing more than the old rating system. They just have 4 levels instead of 6.
The terms gold and silver are what were already there and are similar to what CodeWeavers uses.
The terms are similar but the AppDB medals provide none of the garantees that the CodeWeavers' medals provide.
If you would like to refine those definitions feel free to submit a patch.
That's the thing with numbers (stars) and medals: it's not clear what they mean. It might be clearer to just state: Not tested Does not install Installs Starts up Usable Perfect
As for the maintainer vs. user rating, both should use the same system since they are both doing the same thing. It's just that the maintainer rating should be given a more prominent place.
[...]
These discussions are important feedback to improving the AppDB, so thank you for your thoughts.
Yes, I am very thankful for all the work people have been putting in the Application Database lately. I think the Application Database is an important piece of WineHQ and it's fantastic to see it get some love and attention at last.