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

[From: Jussi Kukkonen]

Niels Breet wrote:
> 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'.

I agree, but apparently many do not. You may remember I posted about
this a few months ago: In addition to complaining I also filed dozens of
bugs in various places. A few packages were fixed as a result (thanks to
all the maintainers who did this), but during the same period many more
broken packages appeared... The only visible result of my work: We now
know that any guidelines on this category issue must be enforced,
maintainers will not follow them otherwise.

I would really hope the maintainers who oppose these category ideas step
up now -- I know they exist since several of my bugs were marked as
WONTFIX or just left unanswered. I've asked them to take their issues to
this list, but this has not really happened AFAICT. An example reply
from Canola bug database:

   * Eduardo Lima:
   This specific section was created with the idea in mind that
   we would have lots of plugins (not related to multimedia), themes
   and other packages such as i18n and we did not know how to label
   them.

   The application manager itself is flexible enough to let us create
   these specific sections so we did it.

Eduardos concern about the hypothetical mass of packages is probably a
real one but his solution (a category per application) makes the
categories useless, IMO.

> 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."

Approve with comments: the i18n/plugin issue must be resolved, but I
don't see it as show-stopper for diablo. Also, fixing categories
probably cannot fix the underlying AM usability problem completely:
debtags or something like it may well be needed additionally (I see
Marius just commented on this): This should be taken into account when
planning.


Jussi


-- 
Jussi Kukkonen