[maemo-developers] do we need garage sandbox repos?

[From: Neil MacLeod]

Ferenc Szekely wrote:
> On 8/9/07, Vlad Vasiliev <vlad at gas.by> wrote:
> Neil raised a very important point in his mail: categories and control
> of the repository. We could experiment with the categories in this
> "extras-testing" repository. First we would need a proposal of
> categories. The best would be to write this on a wiki page. Neil,
> would you mind coming up with a draft?
> 

>From this initial list that I see on my N800 today:

Accessories     <---- Too general? Includes evince, would Office be a better choice?
Applications    <---- Again, too general?
cli             <---- All lowercase, and pretty meaningless
Communication   <---- Only contains VNC, and gets it about right
connectivity    <---- Again all lowercase, contains mnotify... hmmm Communication??
Daemon          <---- Only dropbear, maybe Communication?
Daemons         <---- Can never have enough Daemons
extras          <---- Lowercase again, contains microb-refui whatever that is...
Games
graphics        <---- Contains an image viewer (mirage) - "Image Viewers" as a category?
home-applet     <---- So good it needed it's own home-applet category
instantmessaging <--- Bless you, Pidgin but what's wrong with Communication?
Locales         <---- Is this really necessary? Again, it's Pidgin
misc            <---- Insightful (not)
Multimedia
Office
Other           <---- Mostly gaming related (fceu, visualboyadvance, xmame etc.)!
Programming     <---- Python, could have gone in Support maybe?
Protocols       <---- More Pidgin!
religion        <---- rrrrrrrr!
sound           <---- kmplayer, what's wrong with the Multimedia category?!
Support         <---- Would seem like a good category for locales, runtimes and other stuff
Themes
Tools           <---\
Utilities       <---- Tools/Utilities/utils... one category to rule them all?
utils           <---/
web             <---- privoxy... how about Daemon, Communication or connectivity?
Web             <---- wordpress... Communication or Applications perhaps

I've produced the following subset of broad categories for consideration:

Communications
Games
Graphics
Multimedia
Office (or perhaps Business Tools?)
Programming
Support
Themes
Utilities (or perhaps Tools?)

Something like FBReader should probably go in the Office category (as it relates to document viewing though not necessarily Word/Excel format), which suggests Office may not be a good title... maybe a Document Viewer category (distinct from document creation tools which should be in "Office").

Applications such as xterm would be categorised as Utilities. Dropbear and ssh could be categorised as Utilities *OR* Communications - should all command line tools be placed in a single category for that purpose or treated the same as GUI packages? Perhaps a "Command Line" category would be appropriate.

Pidgin would be categorised as Communications, however Pidgin protocols might be categorised as Support, as would any locales (eg. Skype). However in order to simplify installation for the user there may be an argument to keep all packages associated with the main application in the same category, such that all Pidgin sound and protocol packages are categorised as "Communications" too.

Any thoughts?