[maemo-developers] The issue of version strings / improving Application manager view

[From: Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

Kallioinen Juha (Nokia-D/Helsinki) wrote:
> The problem is imho the Application manager, not the version numbers.
> 
> What's the point of even displaying the version number in the Application 
> manager's default view? I personally don't care about the version at all and 
> I certainly won't remember if an application's version has been updated by 
> looking at the list view. Am I alone with this opinion? Why do you need to 
> see the version there? The update manager will gladly tell me if I have an 
> older version installed and if I don't, won't I just install whatever the 
> Application manager offers me?

The alpha/beta/stable status would be interesting.

I.e. is this a bugfix release or one with new buggy features?


> The package version can anyways be found from the package details page, 
> where there's more space available for it too.

A link to package page that opens Browser would be best I think.


> A much more interesting bit of data instead of the package version to be 
> shown by default might be the date when the package was uploaded. Also the 
> Application manager could use a 'show new packages' view.
> 
> But these of course require changes to the Application manager and maybe 
> even to apt/dpkg database to be able to show the package's date and are more 
> difficult to implement than just making nicer version numbers.
> 
> Maybe a nice version number could really just be the date the package was 
> created. That would fulfill my first wish, but we'd lose the upstream 
> version trackability :)


	- Eero