[maemo-developers] Command line applications and Extras

[From: Graham Cobb]

On Friday 08 January 2010 17:24:22 Valerio Valerio wrote:
> > NOOOO!!!
>
> Well the community made a decision, it was discussed during a long period
> of time here and in TMO, don't you think we should respect the community
> decision ?

I don't think the community made a decision.  I think the community has many 
different views with nothing having majority support except that users need 
an easy way to ignore command line apps.  My recollection of the part of the 
community that lives on this mailing list was that the preferred option was 
the icon/badge and I thought that was what we were working towards.

> Don't know if I get it, your suggestion is to not change anything ?

My suggestion is to do four things:

1) Require all user/ packages which do not install an application icon to use 
the community-defined icon or badge to indicate that. Note that this is 
nothing to do with whether the UI is GUI or command-line or no UI at all -- 
it is about whether it installs an application icon and it is intended to 
reduce user confusion.

2) Add a package field to mark the app as command-line so that future user 
interfaces can, if they wish, implement controls to allow users to hide 
command line apps.  Exact mechanism was still TBD but something like debtags 
seemed to be favourite.

3) Enhance HAM to implement the "hide/show command line apps" option (using 
the field introduced in 2) to reduce clutter for people who don't want to see 
command line apps.  This is how I interpreted the meaning of "switcher" in 
the brainstorm solution 3 and I would be happy to support that.  I am not 
happy to support any abuse of the "category" field.

4) Meanwhile, add popularity and ratings filters to maemo.org, possibly as 
part of application karma or possibly separately.  And strongly encourage new 
users to use maemo.org for finding new applications.

My personal view is that 4 is the real solution to not just this but many 
other QA issues: let the users tell us which apps are good.  If we invest the 
effort in that we can save a lot of angst about all sorts of arbitrary rules 
in QA and get the QA process back to focusing on serious issues like device 
stability, etc.

Graham