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

[From: Graham Cobb]

On Thursday 17 April 2008 13:33:31 Jussi Kukkonen wrote:
> 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. 

That was very useful, thanks.  For GPE I fixed the packages appearing at the 
user level which should not be there.  But I did not change the section 
(user/pim) for the ones which should be visible to users and have no plans to 
do so.  If we had a scheme for changing the official list of categories (for 
example the Wiki page suggestion) I would submit "pim" -- and we could have a 
useful discussion on whether it should be pim, or PIM or whatever.  But, in 
any case, it won't be one of the existing categories.

> 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 strongly disagree.  Enforcement will just move us back into the problem that 
people don't put packages in extras and users can't find them, decreasing the 
success of the Maemo platform in the world.

The right answer is a better GUI, probably with hierarchical categories, but 
that is not going to happen any time soon.

> 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:

Although I do not think we want a category for *every* application I have some 
sympathy with Canola.  I see no reason to ban categories for applications -- 
the criterion should just be whether they are helpful to the users.  If a 
category for an application bundles up a lot of entries which would otherwise 
get in the way of people who don't use the application then I say "great!".

Graham