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
