[maemo-developers] Software categories (was do we need garage sandbox repos?)

[From: Neil MacLeod]

Eero Tamminen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Could you first define what you mean by "category"?
> 
> I have a bug in Bugzilla about the terminology, and it's not very clear:
>   https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1524
> 
> This is the relevant part in Debian Policy:
>   http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-archive.html#s-subsections
> 
> The Maemo sections should at least try to mostly match Debian as we use
> Debian as upstream.  Otherwise there will be useless patching of
> packages when they are built/ported for Maemo.
> 
> 
> 	- Eero

Having downloaded a handful of debs and viewed the info with "dpkg --info <deb>" it's clear that by "category" I mean "Section", eg. ncurses-bin appears in the category "cli" within Application Manager while the deb has a "Section" value set to "user/cli".

I'm all for standardisation with Debian if that makes life easier, however the "authoritative list of sections" are:

admin, base, comm, contrib, devel, doc, editors, electronics, embedded, games, gnome, graphics, hamradio, interpreters, kde, libs, libdevel, mail, math, misc, net, news, non-free, oldlibs, otherosfs, perl, python, science, shells, sound, tex, text, utils, web, x11

and my immediate observation is that some of the Sections may not be appropriate for such prominent display/filtering in a consumer oriented device (eg. comm, net, doc, utils and x11 for starters), and that if we decide to follow the Debian Section naming convention the Application Manager will need to "pretty print" the output (ie. games -> Games).

While standardisation may be a good thing, for a consumer oriented device it may be more appropriate to consider a consumer-friendly categorisation/Section naming scheme in place of, or in addition to, the standard Debian Sections. Given the terse and somewhat unfriendly nature of the Debian Sections, I strongly suggest that we consider a more consumer-friendly alternative, perhaps by having the Application Manager implement a Debian->Maemo Section mapping, ie comm -> Coummunications, doc -> Office, games -> Games, web -> Communications etc. etc.