[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Application catalog from repositories

[From: Tommi Komulainen]

Hi,

I hacked together a small script which reads the Packages.gz files from
a configured set of repositories and generates a catalog page showing
all packages, grouped by sections. Maybe someone finds this useful.

Example page:
http://www.iki.fi/tkomulai/maemo/mistral-application-catalog-2006-07-16.html

Script source:
http://www.iki.fi/tkomulai/maemo/generate-catalog.py

One thing you may notice is that there's little consistency between
packages currently.

Personally I think any application catalog should be able to handle and
collect the mandatory information (sections, name, version, description)
automatically so that the data is taken straight from the packages where
it has to be anyway. That should encourage using repositories instead of
links to files as well as increase package metadata quality. Would just
need a way nice way to integrate the package data with screenshots,
comments, etc. Maybe Debian or Ubuntu already have one, I don't know.

Of course once you crawl multiple repositories like this you could even
mirror all the packages in one repository and save the user the trouble
of configuring several of them in the application installer.


-- 
Tommi Komulainen                            <tommi.komulainen at nokia.com>