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

[From: Guillem Jover]

Hi,

On Mon, 2007-08-13 at 15:32:01 +0300, Eero Tamminen wrote:
> 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".

There's no cli section in Debian. But anyway, what you did is incorrect,
as the Section from the '.deb' packages is not the authoritative
source. The Section:s are overriden on the archive, so you should check
from the Package metaindex files. «apt-cache show» is your friend.

> 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...

I'd say Section:s are something obsolete which used to work more or
less when Debian size was way way smaller. It was also used for some
time to define what was part of the base system for example, this is
not the case anymore.

The future is in debtags, which is way more powerful and flexible.
Some frontents have some support for it already. For example you
can do something like:

  $ aptitude search ~Guse::debugging ~Gimplemented-in::haskell

> 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?

I don't think there's any mapping. And I don't think there should be
much effort spent on this, tagging on the other hand might be more
useful.

  <http://debtags.alioth.debian.org/>

regards,
guillem