[maemo-community] [Council] Package categories

[From: Andrew Flegg]

On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 10:48 AM, Simon Pickering
<S.G.Pickering at bath.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> My view is this: We should probably look at debtags, but in the meantime,
> start with the full list of categories which Niels pulled out (i.e. the
> Debian ones + the extra ones he suggested), and ask the -devel list if
> there are any they would like removed; patch the package manager to place
> all packages which don't have an official category into an "Other"
> section.

Agreed.

> That should make things clearer for the users as there are fewer sections
> for them to look at, no worse than at the moment (they can still search
> "All" just as most people do, and hopefully having their package appear in
> "Others" will spur package maintainers to either change their section or
> get involved in explaining why they need something extra.

One of the justifications people use is that they have a large number
of plugins/translation packs etc. Putting these in their own section
"prevents" user confusion by isolating them. This, of course, breaks
down when everyone uses "All" all of the time.

My suggestion would be to take further the customisation we require of
the "Section" header and have the following valid values for
"Section":

   1) "Section: <debian_section>"
      - Debian Packaging Manual,
        http://wiki.maemo.org/Task:Package_categories#Debian

   2) "Section: user/<maemo_section>[,<maemo_section>]*"
      - Maemo Packaging Policy (revised),
        http://wiki.maemo.org/Task:Package_categories#Additional_categories

   3) "Section: user/<package>/<maemo_section>"
      - Only show package if <package> is installed.

  where:
    <debian_section> = (admin|comm|devel|doc|editors|electronics|...)

    <maemo_section>  = (communication|games|multimedia|...)

The comma-separated version is optional, but means that app authors
don't have to spend ages working out if (say) an online collaboration
tool is "communication" or "office". They can put it in both. Consider
this DebTags::Lite.

The second enhancement is to allow "Section:
user/<package>/<maemo_section>" - this means that a package will
appear only in a list if its parent (<package>) is installed. So, you
could have:

    Package: canola2
    Section: user/multimedia

    Package: canola2-theme-red
    Section: user/canola2/themes

Thoughts welcome.

Cheers,

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew at bleb.org  |  http://www.bleb.org/
maemo.org Community Council member