Who's Rosanne? Why so much "cleanup"?

[elus89]

So, lately a few of the entries I have been keeping an eye on and have been contributing to over the years have had comments deleted by a certain administrator by the name of Rosanne. I feel this "cleanup" action to be highly repulsive and detractive to the many contributors from the WINE community over the years. The type of software available for WINE porting is often decades old, so comments of age should be held on this database without question as all information for old software is useful. This is especially true, as WINE itself has deprecations, which make newer versions less useful. I ask the admins of WINEHQ and the WINE community in general to please put this Rosanne's actions to a stop.

For reference, the entries that I am speaking of are Heroes 3 Complete and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.

[dimesio]

That would be me, doing my job as an AppDB admin. The maintainer guidelines state that "all stale data should be removed" from the comments section. For unmaintained entries, that job falls to the admins; my rule of thumb is one year, and if I think the information in an old comment might still be relevant (and isn't already mentioned in a test report, maintainer note, or bug report), I put it in a maintainer note.

Since I'm dealing with apps I don't personally use, I sometimes don't realize that something in an old comment is still pertinent. If there was information in any of the comments deleted from the entries you mention that you feel is still relevant to current Wine, let me know what it was and I'll put it in a maintainer note, or even better, apply to be a maintainer and make those decisions yourself.

As to whether all old information is useful, I disagree. Following outdated advice can cause problems in current Wine, and regressions should be dealt with by filing bug reports.

[Artium]

Hi,

You have deleted two comments from my test result here: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager. ... &iId=21554

One was a correction to the test report. I had to put it in the comments because editing test reports is not possible.
The other comment was unrelated to Wine at all. A simple statement that a joystick is required for proper game play.

I see no reason why these comments should have been deleted.
Please revert these changes.

Regarding usefulness of old information, outdated advice can cause problem, but also can help solve problems. For many applications, information like this is very scarce. Therefore I think it is better to have something that might be wrong instead of nothing at all. The comments have a date on them, so why can't you let the users decide if he wants to use it or not?

One last thing, sometimes these comments are the product of hours of tinkering. Deleting them like this is disrespectful to the authors' time and effort invested.

[dimesio]

There's no way to revert deletions. Tell me what to say to correct your test report, and I will edit it for you. FYI, that offer goes for anyone who needs to correct a test report. Either post the info here or PM me, or if you prefer, submit a new test report and include a note in the Extra comments asking that the incorrect report be deleted.

Comments unrelated to Wine don't belong in the AppDB at all.

I disagree that wrong information is better than no information. I've seen too many problems caused by people following wrong information, and that includes many who either overlooked the date or didn't understand how much it matters.

You can always apply to be a maintainer and have control over the comments yourself.

[dimesio]

I found your correction in Google's cache and have edited your report accordingly. In the future, please do either contact me with such corrections, or submit a corrected test report, as there is no guarantee that users reading a report will scroll down and see any corrections made in comments.

[capitanpistacho]

I had the same feelings, and also happend to me, not the right way to deal with the work of others, bests.