Wine Application Database

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Contents

Introduction

The Wine Application Database is the official list of programs and how well they work under Wine. Many programs can now be run with minor adjustments to the configuration of Wine. It is the first place to look and post when you are considering some software for Wine.

Maintainers and users have the ability to rate each wine version as

The Application Database now works closely with Bugzilla, the bug reporting tool. T. Lambregts gave a status update in Nov 2006]: We now have over 500 individuals who have signed up to be maintainer of [794 entries] [...] even with all the maintainers and administrators it seems we are always a couple of days behind checking new application submissions and test results. [Ed: can you help with your favourite program? More Maintainers and Supermaintainers are needed]

The Application Database is essential to the development of Wine. The developers are unable to test every Windows application as Wine continues to move forward. They depend upon you to test your favorite software and need you to report the bugs you find and link them to the application database so they can work with you to fix them. If you can promptly report breakages, they can get fixed quickly. If you spend the little time required to find the patch which caused the problem using Wine Regression Testing, it will get fixed much, much faster. A developer takes pride in his work and if you respectfully point out that his patch has affected your program, you will get his attention, and as seen from the mailing lists, a prompt fix is not uncommon.

Adding an Application

If your software is not listed, please add it. It will be placed in a queue and after a administrator has reviewed it (This is to prevent and occasionally delete spam entries), it will be officially listed. they are very, very busy so this will take a few days.

Linking a bug report to a A newly listed Application

You can add links to queued apps, but it's not intuitive. [..] The current process is very simple. [May 09]

  1. . Submit an application in the AppDB.
  2. . Submit a bug report for the app.
  3. . When the app is accepted into the appdb, you receive an email.
  4. Open the app and add the bug.

The real problem is people not bothering to add links at all, I've added over a hundred this week Winehq Bugzilla entry 155593

Maintainers

As the Appdb help file explains: Maintainers are crucial to the usefulness of the AppDB as they ensure that information is kept up-to-date. With the large number of applications and versions present in the AppDB today it would be a impossible task for the small number of Wine developers to try to perform this task. Your role is essential.

Please consider volunteering to be a Maintainer for the software you run on Wine.

Regularly Submitting results for installing and running on the latest version of Wine makes a big difference for others considering using Wine. By looking at how well the software runs others can be encouraged to try it themselves and together you can make progress in finding workarounds. By testing the software you will also notice when something breaks and when you make a bug report, the bugzilla team will often point it out to the person who broke it. If you are slightly more technically minded, you are able to regularly compile wine and test it before each fortnightly release then you will catch breakages before each wine release.

  • Who can be a Maintainer? - anyone. no programming experience required.
  • What is required of a Maintainer? - not much, but you do make a real difference.


A big advantage of being a maintainer is that as you quickly become familiar with installing and using wine with your software, you can have a direct hand in improving wine and your software. Many times you will find very handy tips posted by others and by posting a summary many benefit from your work. When you are asked a question you don't know, simply post in the wine-users forum and perhaps someone can help. You can always point out that commercial support is provided by Codeweavers.

Just by being there, you make a difference. A maintainer quickly tests each monthly release of wine, and adds to the application database a rating of how good it runs.. gold/silver/bronze or garbage. Wine is constantly being improved, and occasionally something breaks. When you do spot a breakage, file a bug in bugzilla and if you want to try and fix it you can then post to the wine-devel mailing list for advice. However, regression testing (which takes usually about 2 hours, in between doing other things) allows you to identify which patch caused the break. By filling out a bugzilla report, posting the name of the software, and the patch which broke it to the wine-devel mailing list, the developer who broke it can have a look at fixing it.

  • This often results in very quick fixes.

Further Help to Wine If you are able to keep an eye out for bug reports for your software and adding a note to the bug report whether you can confirm if it is a real bug or perhaps a configuration error, you can help the bugzilla team and developers spend more time on improving Wine and less time on trying to decipher faulty bug reports. For each Wine release, make a small note in the bug confirming whether it is still present or if it has been fixed.

Wine Appdb Maintainers Notes

There is a handy list of some Tips for Maintainers here

Further Reading

Ratings

How the software runs on wine is rated by Maintainers and users. http://appdb.winehq.org/browse_by_rating.php Gold means that it works flawlessly with some workarounds. Platinum means it just works fine.

A. English [Jan 09 wine user]: There was a discussion on this on wine-devel recently. The problem is that users decide the rating, and although they're checked by administrators, they can slip by. [...]. If patches are required, it should not be gold, etc. All ratings should be based on what you can do _without_ recompiling.

Test Results

Even if you are not a maintainer, you can add test results. However, you can't edit the submitted test results in AppDB - You have to submit new results. Your submissions a valuable. You will use the software differently than perhaps the maintainer, so tests also help the maintainer become aware of other bugs in the program. They can help other users who use the same distribution of linux and help the maintainer learn of tips for different users.

Mailing List Comments

Scripting Installs based upon the Application Database

In a discussion about third party tools helping users to instals software by automating the modifying the standard wine setup and by using Windows Dlls, several points were noted. Some developers concerns were centered on this potentially hindering the development of Wine.

One promoted: having list of 'hacks' stored in 'unified' manner within repository simplifies access to 'fixups' for outstanding issues. At least they will be at one place (similar to AppDB now).

D. Kegel: Pragmatically, I understand where you're coming from. What's missing is for you to declare things like:

That last one especially would endear you to the Wine community.[June wine devel 2007]

Troubleshooting the Application Database

The Database doesnt list my Software

If your software or version is not in the application database, please test it with wine and submit it to the list. Even better, list yourself as a maintainer and help make a real difference with wine.

"Further Reading'

My Software is no longer listed

A user reported: I submitted Fruity Loop 7 to the AppDB and it got accepted and then after a little while it got deleted. I don't know why as the notification did not give a reason

D. Kegel [July 07 wine user] We had some gremlins deleting stuff from the appdb, maybe you got hit. When was this?

A Maintainer wrote [Dec 07 wine devel] Is it standard practice to remove all old versions of a program except for the most recent?

A. Sornes: That's correct. If a version is not usable anymore (because it connects to a server etc.) it can be made obsolete so votes will be moved to a usable one. We are in the process of adding an un-delete system to the AppDB so issues like the recent ones can be fixed.

New Versions of Wine

A developer asked [Feb 07]: Does someone manually add new versions to bugzilla or is it done automatically?

Ben: It's done manually by an admin.

Adding Untested Software

A developer questioned why he could not add software which he had not tested. A. Sones [Mar 07 wine-devel] in the past, there were some applications in the database without test results. This led to users asking questions about what was wrong, or reporting them (correctly) as errors and prompting their deletion.

Finding out which applications work with Wine is the only purpose of the AppDB, and people will lose the overview if we make it a general application database. Sure, we have download browsers and links to patches etc., but that is only supplementary information. Besides, submitting applications that no one maintains means the data will become outdated pretty soon. If people were to expect every application in the world being in the database, they would also expect the information to be up to date at all times.

Adding test to Software without a Maintainer

These tests are moderated by the Administrators for the Application Database. This can be a high workload, so if you can be a Maintainer for your favorite software, this would help them out. If you are a maintainer already and want to help out in moderating the entries they might be interested.

J. Zaroyko [nov 08 bug16193]: [in reply to A. English suggesting more volunteers to administrate] I guess this could also work. If you have anyone in mind and they are interested, as an administrator you can make other users administrators too through their users preferences page.

File Paths

A user noticed that when he typed a path, it didnt display the '/' charactor: If I enter something like Windows\system, it shows up fine in the preview, but when it actually goes to the real page it shows as Windowssystem

Andrew Neil Ramage pointed out the solution: Sounds like a Unix/Linux feature where the backslash is used for escape codes, so you should use double backslashes. eg, C:\\Some\\Directory\\File [The user reported this was the answer] Wine Archive

Company Rename

In the past these seem to have been fixed by users posting to the wineuser mailing list or forum with a good subject line so admins can easily spot it. One post with the subject line Adding a new developer (company) to AppDB was posted possibly twice and recieved the reply: Ok I have updated the company for you.

Posting Screen Shots

Screenshots are an excellent way to show developers what happens on Wine. A comparison with a Windows screenshot can often speak volumes.

There is a currently [July 05] an issue with large screenshots, where the upload will fail. The developers are aware of this and are working toward a fix. J. Ernst: It's [currently] impossible to send a file of 700k J. Newman [July 05]: I've increased the max upload size. [But the discussion found there was another apparent limitation that required some more troubleshooting] Wine Archive

A user [July 05]: I just looked at some screenshots I sent in for Steam: http://appdb.winehq.org/screenshots.php?appId=1163&versionId= (the HL Multiplayer Shot.) If you look at it, you'll notice the color depth is screwed up. What's going on?

C. Morgan: Yes. This is likely due to the older version of GD that we have on the server. We are anxiously awaiting an upgrade to a newer version :-)

Posting the Terminal Output

When you run your program from the command line, sometimes Wine reports important error messages. When making a bug report, add an attachment with the terminal output, noting the version of Wine that you used.

A. English [Aug 07 wine bug 9494]: To get full terminal output, run your app like this: 

$ wine foo.exe &> /tmp/output.txt

Then attach (do not paste) /tmp/output.txt.

Website Issues

Opera Support

[Bug 8928] Opera reports: "Sorry, Opera is not yet supported by Xinha."

This was an unfortunate side affect of using Xinha.


C. Morgan explained: Xinha has no support for Opera. There isn't much we can do until Xinha adds this support or we replace Xinha with something similar that has Opera support. I upgrade Xinha regularly to keep up with the latest release so this issue should go away in the future when the next Xinha release comes out and we upgrade to it.

Searching

A user reported searching difficulties searching the appdb [wine bug9541 Sept 07].

J: Yes, you need to enable javascript for both winehq.com and google.com. Another solution would be nice(sending only "searchtext" and "site:appdb.winehq.org" to google and getting back the result...)

Administration of the Wine Application Database

T. Lambregts Current active Administrators are [Nov 06]:

We can always use more help [...] If you know php and would like to help out you can download the source http://www.winehq.org/site/cvs

There are lots of features that would enhance the AppDB please have a look at the wiki and feel free to add other stuff that you think would be good to have. http://wiki.winehq.org/AppdbInfo


If you want to help out with the application database, more people would be good.One user wrote april 08: I wouldn't mind helping out here. Tell me what to do. qwerynm: You could ask Amorphous (Jan Zerebecki), or Tony Lambregts to get a maintainer account. Then basic job is to read all the new submissions of apps and new versions, and submit them into appdb if you approve them.

A change may be coming to the appdb as was noted in the developer list 2009 feb. An official wiki page and an IRC was planned: http://wiki.winehq.org/AppDBUpgrades

D. Kegel wrote jan 09 winedevel: http://wiki.winehq.org/AppsThatSupportWine is a nice stopgap, but perhaps it should be a report in the appdb, driven by a checkbox that maintainers can check. What do folks think? [there was some support for this, so it may be added by the time your read this]


Wine Application Database Patches

A developer asked [May 06]:Is there any way to expedite the patch submission process. I submitted a patch to wine-patches quite a while ago for the AppDB TestResulsts.php page as outlined in bug 5155.

Chris Morgan: Was did it have "AppDB" at the front of the subject? Did you copy me on it?

He then checked and applied the patch wine archive

Another developer queried why his patch wasn't applied. C. Morgan [May 06]: This doesn't apply cleanly after EA Durbin's patch to the same file. wine archive

Wine Application Database Links


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