[maemo-developers] Application manager category view proposals

[From: Andrew Flegg]

On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 10:41 AM, Marius Vollmer
<marius.vollmer at nokia.com> wrote:
> "ext Andrew Flegg" <andrew at bleb.org> writes:
>
>> Well, in the absence of anything else, I've now added a patch against
>> #3103 which makes the category list look like this:
>>
>>     http://bleb.org/software/maemo/h-a-m-grid.png
>
> Applied, thanks!

No problem :-)

> (It's a bit hard to find since the h-a-m Fremantle trunk is now in Git:
>
>    git clone http://stage.maemo.org/~haf/mvo/git/hildon-app-mgr.git/
>
> I'll clean this up soonish.  I'll also apply it to Diablo.)

The trunk in svn also seems to be fremantleish, in that it relies on a
later version of glib (2.16) than is in diablo (v2.12). Is h-a-m going
to be in git permanently, or is that just a playground, with the
master still being in svn?

>>     3) Add support for extra slashes in `Section' header to give
>>        sub-categories within a package view.
>
> We should seriously look at using Debtags instead of the old section
> hack.
>
>    http://debtags.alioth.debian.org/
>
> We could keep compatibility with the Section hack, or we could use this
> opportunity to clean up and force everybody to start using tags for
> Fremantle.

Separate discussion, that. There's a thread on -community and the wiki page :-)

>>     4) Enforce that anything which isn't in the standard list of
>>        categories goes into 'Other' (I played with this in
>>        src/main.cc:canonicalize_section_name or nicify_section_name
>>        but it'd also need a GHashTable to combine the section
>>        infos).
>
> I don't like this idea very much.  I think we should not hardcode a list
> of allowed categories into the application manager.  That list should at
> least be updateable independently from the hildon-application-manager
> package.
>
> Enforcing categories is better done in the repository.

I've two concerns here:

    1) I worry that banning packages which don't comply from the
       repository could undo all the good work that's already been
       done in getting stuff into Extras. However, it could be that
       with the education programme which has been ongoing, this'll
       be less of an issue as long as people are willing to help.

    2) The category list looks rubbish when displaying the arbitrary
       crap people put into section headers.

Cheers,

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew at bleb.org  |  http://www.bleb.org/
maemo.org Community Council member