AppDB: Bug #49999 - It should be possible to submit results for all versions of the current stable branch

[Joerg Schiermeier]

Hi list!

According to Austins recommendation to discuss the following bug in
Wine-devel I want to do exactly this:

it's about:
https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49999

The original bug reporter (elk_aide@e-mail-address-shortened) wrotes:

---cite---
Lots of Linux Distributions and FreeBSD only ship the stable releases
of wine in their repositories. They often stick to the first minor
release (In Debian and FreeBSD this currently is 5.0 for example).

I think it should be possible to submit tests with the distribution's
own most recent wine package, as that probably is the main way wine is
aquired.

Therefore the AppDB list should include the "outdated" minor releases
of the current stable branch for selection aswell. This is currently
not the case (only 5.0.2 is available for selection currently).
---/cite---

In my point of view this is not the problem of the wine authors. The
maintainer of a distro will have to maintain the (stable) wine packages
he/she supervises and should always provide the latest stable version
of wine.
So there is no need to open this door in the AppDB formula.
Consequently I recommended to flag this bug as "wont fix".

Austin (English) disagrees and reopens the bug and suggest this
discussion thread.

So please, write, what you think about this point!

(And please excuse also my bad English ...:).

[Rosanne DiMesio]

On Thu, 4 Nov 2021 20:57:18 +0100
Joerg Schiermeier  wrote:
> Therefore the AppDB list should include the "outdated" minor releases
> of the current stable branch for selection aswell. This is currently
> not the case (only 5.0.2 is available for selection currently).

The AppDB reads the list of Wine versions directly from Bugzilla, which does not distinguish branches; it is simply a list of numbers, in order of release. After Wine 1.0 came out, the AppDB code was changed to keep all the stable releases available for selection in a separate list, while still getting the development releases from Bugzilla. Since doing that required someone to actively send patches to manually add each stable release to the stable list, that worked out about as well as you might expect. One of the changes I made to the AppDB a few years ago was to get rid of the separate list, but expand the the number of releases available for selection from six to ten. With stable updates on roughly a three month cycle, that has meant the latest stable release is always available for selection, without any manual intervention.

Expanding the number of versions available for selection is the easiest way to keep all the current stable updates available, but that list will then also include all the development releases in the same range, leading to a very long dropdown list. Maintaining a separate list of stable releases would require more extensive changes to the code, and if it does not include some mechanism to automatically fetch the stable versions from Bugzilla, will probably fail for the same reason the last attempt did.