[maemo-community] [Council] Package categories

[From: Andrew Flegg]

On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 12:25 PM, Simon Pickering
<S.G.Pickering at bath.ac.uk> wrote:
>
[snip]
>
>> 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
>
> Typo I hope, canola2 shouldn't be a top-level section name imo.

Agreed. And it wouldn't be. This would result in "canola2-theme-red"
appearing in the "Themes" section; but only if canola2 was installed.
There're no sub-categories with this suggestion, just using the
"Section" to represent additional UI dependencies.

> Better this:
>
>    Package: canola2-theme-red
>    Section: user/multimedia/canola2/themes

...however, here, you have sub-categories. That'd require a total
revamp of the Application Manager, AIUI. Just hiding canola2-theme-red
(from "themes") until canola2 is installed (from "multimedia") would
solve the use case IMHO.

If the Application Manager could be changed to support arbitrary-depth
package sections, then I'd much prefer your approach of sub-sections
(although that may make the rules and parsing of comma-separated
sections harder ;-)). I suspect that's a lot of code.

One thing which - again - we come back to as a community: Nokia have
plans for the entirety of the UI in Fremantle. This'll include Hildon
App Mgr. There's no point the community helping to develop patches for
this if the UI is going to be rewritten to better fit with Fremantle's
look & feel anyway. So, I've CC'ed Marius for any input he might have
on the direction of the App Mgr which could impact the direction, as a
community, we think this should take.

Cheers,

Andrew

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