[maemo-developers] Beyond Application Manager Categories

[From: Marius Vollmer]

Hi,

with the recent category discussion coming to a close, I already have
something to think about that might go beyond categories.

But first, many thanks to everybody involved in the recent category
cleanup!  I will catch up carefully and will do my best to make the
necessary changes to the Application Manager.


Ok.  I think a central component like the Application manager is OK for
the routine maintenance task of keeping your software uptodate.  You
want to be notified about available updates and hit a big button to
install them all.  Maybe you want to review a bit what you are about to
install.

But the current AM is a pretty unfriendly place for browsing a long list
of available applications.  In the past, I kept saying that I don't want
the AM to turn into a portal for applications, that should be left to
the browser.  We have downloads.maemo.org, which is this portal.  Are
people using it?  As a thought experiment, could we remove the "Browse
installable applications" button from the AM and get by with just
downloads.maemo.org?  Should we work on better integration?
Downloads.maemo.org could use information from the device to give a view
that is nicely tailored to each device.

There is another angle: many applications are extensible with plugins
and add-ons, etc.  There is a lot of potential there to simplify
juggling with these packages.  For example, there is no point to even
show the pidgin-l10n-klingon package if you don't have Pidgin installed.
This add-on management is probably a bit hard to do for a portal site
like downloads.maemo.org.  But the current AM is not much better.

Applications might want to do their own add-on management, or want to
defer to a central application that is good at it.  For example, the
theme selector could list available themes in addition to the installed
ones.  The media player might be able to figure out that a codec add-on
is missing and offer to install it.  This goes into the direction of
PackageKit and "package management as a system service".  Something to
keep in mind.  It'll take some non-trivial amount of work and
commitment.

But, maybe we can get something worthwhile with only a few changes to
the current Application manager.

 - We can let applications open a specific category in the Application
   manager, with the idea that useful add-ons for that application are
   found in that category.

   This would put more pressure on the categories: the Boingo category
   might want to come back, for example.

 - Or we can let applications compute their own list of packages (using
   debtags, say), and ask the Application manager to install them.  This
   would essentially create a temporary category under control of an
   appliction.  Will users understand what is going on?

Opinions?

Kristiina and Tero (in CC) have a need for something like this.  Am I on
the right track here?