On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 2:24 PM, Luke Benstead kazade@gmail.com wrote:
I can also see what you mean about spyware, but other apps retrieve stuff from the web if there is a connection (CDDB, and album covers are two examples).
Wine transmitting every application I run to someone else would be rather worrying...
It should rather be opt-in. Such as "Wine has detected that it is the first time you run this application, do you want to check AppDb for more information (Yes/No/Ask again/Never ask for any application)" It must be easy to disable globally as well... It might have some other uses as well such as "A newer version of the application works better", etc.
I might be handy to allow automatic submission of test data to AppDb (which IMHO might be more useful than just retrieving...), which should automatically include the Wine executables' checksums + version, distro info (if accessible from lsb-release, parts of the uname output & kernel checksum, which might be used to detect the distro), kernel version, cpu architecture, X server name and version, graphics driver name and version, DLL overrides, etc. This might help modified wine versions and the level of tweaks to be detected by AppDb automatically. (There should be a very specific opt-in process for this data's submission though, such as letting the user manually upload a file with this data and fully disclosing the file's contents) This kind of data can be handy for bug reports as well.
Gert