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

[From: Andrew Flegg]

On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 12:33 PM, Marius Vollmer
<marius.vollmer at nokia.com> wrote:
> "ext Niels Breet" <maemo at breet.com> writes:
>
>  > We need to come up with an official list and don't allow new categories to
>  > be created unless the community feels it is needed.
>
>  I am sure you notice the conflict here: whatever list you come up with
>  will be unsuitable for someone.  You want strict policy enforcement,
>  based on community 'feelings'.  How can that work?

Can it be any worse than the mess we're in now? Having said that,
perhaps the MOTU-style proposal of gatekeepers doing QA checks could
help here. Deviation is permitted, if it gets through a gatekeeper:

    http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail//maemo-developers/2008-January/013889.html

>  One approach in a situation where consensus is clearly beneficial is to
>  make a first shot at a concrete policy that everybody is supposed to
>  follow, but make it possible to deviate from that policy in practice.

That's what we've got now! There's a pre-defined list of categories
and a note saying "don't deviate from these if you don't want to".
It's not worked. Apps from Nokia's own commercial partners, and
high-visibility apps like Canola either think the guidelines don't
apply to them; the guidelines don't cover the cases they have to
support or aren't aware of them.

>  That way, you end up with the people willing to put in the effort to be
>  the ones who define the policy.

Yeah, agreed. This goes back to the gatekeepers suggestion.

> For example, "Pidgin" might want a category of
>  its own since it has many related packages that would otherwise be
>  scattered all over the place.  We could maybe improve the Application
>  manager UI to make this a non-issue by grouping related packages in
>  other ways (say, installing Pidgin gives a list with checkboxes where
>  you can select additional components, based on the Recommends and
>  Suggests fields of a package).

Personally, I can only use "All" to find stuff, because of the bad
categorisation; but this view is effectively spammed by large numbers
of plugins for Canola, Pidgin, gcompris etc.

Hierarchy is probably necessary here, with the Pidgin plugins being in
Communications/Pidgin etc.

Cheers,

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew at bleb.org | http://www.bleb.org/