[maemo-developers] Command line applications and Extras

[From: Marius Vollmer]

ext Valerio Valerio <vdv100 at gmail.com> writes:

> Are the responsible(s) for the Application Manager willing to implement this
> change and ship it in a firmware update ? (pr1.2, pr1.3)

I think it is now high time to move the category definitions out of ham
and somehow get them from the repositories themselves.

I think the QA process for Maemo Extras is now strong enough to make
sure that only packages with 'good' categories reach the end user.  In
other words, I think that the category mess can now be sorted out in the
repository itself and the Application manager can again be permissive.

Maybe this isn't true enough yet, and we still want HAM to police the
categories.  In any case, we need to read information about categories
from the repositories: translations, icons, other things.

HAM could read this extra configuration from the repository itself
(i.e., not from a package in that repository), in the same way it reads
the Release and Packages files.  A Release could have a pointer to
"repository meta data" files that contain additional information.

This would require changes to the repository maintainence machine on
maemo.org, and thus it would maybe be better to get the repository meta
data from a package in the repository, using a canonical name made from
the information in Release.  (Have to think about how to do that
concretely.)