help design a query interface for DStress' "bad apple" database

[Georg Wrede]

Thomas Kuehne wrote:
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> DStress now stores unexpected testcase results along with compiler
> messages and the offending source code in a MySQL database. What would
> be the best query interface(s)?

Is that like "what technology to use" or "how should the web page look 
like, i.e. what fields should there be for the user to fill"?

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More important would be to know _what_things_ users want to find there. 
In other words, find out the *use*cases*, and your answers will present 
themselves automatically.

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Then again, it is natural that the test cases are stored in a relational 
database. There's hardly any other way to manage them conveniently. But 
that does not mean that the user wants to interact with the database at all.

For example, it may well be that there are only two kinds of retrievals: 
the first kind is a person who'se seen an article about a specific test 
case, and he wants to download only that one. And the second kind being 
someone who wants to help fixind D bugs, and therefore he wants to 
download all current unexpected results for the specific OS/compiler 
combination he happens to own.

IF THIS REALLY is the case, then we don't need the DB UI at all. Simply 
have the (is it 6 different?) OS/compiler bug sets as downloadable zips, 
on the downlioads page.

As for the individual cases, they're all small, and the most convenient 
way to get them would be if you have a page where they are listed, and 
clicking a link brings the source code right on your screen, where you 
can look at it, and if it looks like what you want, then "save-as" on 
your own computer. (I have suggested this to you some 4-5 times during 
the past 5 years.)

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Of course I might be all wrong, and we do need a user interface that 
lets the user choose "all odd-numbered test cases either for Mac with 
GDC or Linux with DMD, submitted third quarter 1995, during West Coast 
office hours, and being more than 1k in length".

Even if you do create this DB interface, I think the most popular 
downloads will still be the all-for-one-arch and the single case 
browsing+save-as.