[maemo-developers] [RFC] Maemo package guidelines: mandatory categories

[From: Niels Breet]

Hi all,

Here is my first suggestion to clean up the complete mess we have at the
moment when it comes to package categories in the maemo extras repository.
There is no official list of categories, which has brought us to state
we are in now.

We have these nice categories for example: 'Boingo', 'Canola'. Those should
never be a category by themselves. We also have a lot of duplicates like
'cli' ,'Commandline' and 'Web','www' and 'Utilities','utils'.

This really has to stop as this is confusing for end users. We, the maemo
community, need to find a solution and fix this.

If we look at Debian, we can see that they have the following list of
categories[1]:

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

My suggestion would be to base our list off the Debian list and remove
the categories that are not suitable for Maemo. We might also want to add
some categories if we find some missing.

admin, comm, devel, doc, editors, games, graphics, interpreters, mail,
net, news, utils

and add:

desktop, database, education, internet, multimedia, office, scientific,
security, system, travel

Please feel free to suggest other categories. Try to keep them as broad as
possible. I would really like to get a list of categories where every
application can be in at least one category. It would be nice not to need
the 'misc' or 'other' category.

Perhaps it would also be a good idea to have the Application Manager
display the pretty name for each category. e.g. comm -> Communication.
That might be step 2 though.

I also would like your feedback on this idea:
"For diablo we only accept packages in the extras/extras-devel repositories
when they have a valid category."

I'm really not sure if we can do this in time for diablo, but at least we
can try to get the community to agree on this. I don't think we can do
anything for existing repositories, but at least we could try for the new
ones.

Please respond with your ideas, but keep it to the category subject only.


- Niels

[1]Debian Sections:
http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-archive.html#s-subsections