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

[From: Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

ext Neil MacLeod wrote:
> 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),

If there's nothing inside given section, it should not be shown,
similarly to menus.  It could be that Debian sections should have
a similar revamp as what they're doing for their menu policy...

Btw. I'm not really sure what or whether there's a formal mapping
between Debian sections and menu policy, maybe some debian developer
could clarify this?


> 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.

This process is called translation.  :-)
These names are gobblegook for people who don't understand English.


	- Eero