[maemo-developers] Repositories mess: conclusions and actions

[From: Tim Teulings]

Hello!

>> * We must find some clever way to get a response from the user 
>> since we cannot trust "the masses" (our masses are not of 
>> equal size then that of debian).
>> * For example: What about the program manager on the device 
>> periodically
>>  requests a rating from you for newly installed applications. 
>> There will of course be a way to switch it off, and the the 
>> notification must not violently jump into the middle of the 
>> screen swinging its broadsword, disturbing my circles.
> 
> We might discuss about this feature in the Application Manager. However,
 > if you find this idea useful it would be faster and probably better 
to start
 > with an installable 3rd party application covering this functionality and
 > targeted to maemo power users.

I checked this. And in fact using libapt-pkg (no header files in chinnok 
beta?) it is easy to get the list of installed packages in user 
sections. Using some application internal configuration file it should 
be possible to locally track rated and unrated packages (and even 
packages where one has rated an earlier version).

One questions however persists: If I now have a local configuration file 
containing new, undelivered ratings, how do I get them into the 
application catalog? Must I really track available/unavailable network 
connection, popup a dialog (or not) and then fake HTML package changes 
by sending successive HTML/SSL requests to the application catalog?

Isn't/shouldn't there be a simpler solution? I'm willing to develop a 
GUI for the rating collection task but I happily delegate the upload to 
somebody else that has knowledge in writing such system service.

-- 
Gruß...
        Tim