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Comment by stuaxo | Hacker News Reader

Another non development way to contribute is on the appdb, testing compatibility -

https://appdb.winehq.org/

Unless you run Debian stable (or probably any LTS distro), in which case they don't want your reports because "your software is too out of date".

I find this attitude odd, because there are (at least) tens of thousands of wine installs under Debian alone. Surely the information is relevant and useful to people, even if the version is no longer officially supported.

As a result, I've stopped wasting my time filing reports only to have them rejected.

The Debian upstream is crazy out of date for almost everything. I get why, I understand the thinking, but they have a point.

At some point vendors - especially open source vendors with limited (volunteer) resources have to call time on supporting older versions. If you're running an unsupported version, and the new version is free to download and install, why would they go out of their way to support you? Their thinking is quite reasonable: it's your choice to use a distro that doesn't track releases frequently, pull down and build a later version from them.

And looking at the release notes 6000+ changes have probably happened since your release. How can they possibly support you and a few thousand Debian users in that scenario with such a small team so focused on so much work?

Nowhere did I say that the WINE folks should support old versions.

I said that the information in the user report could be relevant and useful to people who still use that version, even if it's unsupported.

These are informational reports of "this app behaves this way under version x." So, and this is isn't about supporting an old version, this is about allowing or not allowing information about old versions in a database.

I don't think more information is harmful to the users, especially when it can help them make an informed decision about whether or not they must upgrade in order to be able to run a particular app.

Debian stable's Wine is often fairly old. I wish there was an easier way to get a newer Wine on stable.

They're rejecting your reports because the issues are often fixed in newer versions - someone would have to re-confirm your reports on a newer version.

> They're rejecting your reports because the issues are often fixed in newer versions

Sure, newer versions fix bugs from older versions. But they don't delete/archive the old reports after a new release, so the reports that are there are already a mix of supported and unsupported versions anyway.

So, I don't see the harm in accepting new reports against older versions, particularly when old versions are still found several major distros (particularly the LTS versions of those distros)

PlayOnLinux? It is a bit frowned upon and gaming oriented, but it offers one click install of any wine version, including unstable, with the ability of having multiple versions installed at the same time.

I run it on top of Debian testing.

Uh, what? There's an up-to-date repository here:

https://wiki.winehq.org/Debian

Yes but not all the user would have it set up. They surely consider that the majority of the users don't.

Maybe the policy about rejecting debian reports came way before they setup the repository.

Hah, wonder when that was set up (wiki suggests Jan 2016). The last time I used Wine in earnest, you had to wget a whole lot of debs and manually install them. Kudos to the project for making it a whole lot easier to stay up to date.

I used to test and submit reports to AppDB back in the day, it's quite satisfying to add to that corpus.

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