[maemo-developers] Repositories mess: conclusions and actions

[From: Tim Teulings]

Hello!

>> * We must find some clever way to get a response from the user 
>> since we cannot trust "the masses" (our masses are not of 
>> equal size then that of debian).
>> * For example: What about the program manager on the device 
>> periodically
>>  requests a rating from you for newly installed applications. 
>> There will of course be a way to switch it off, and the the 
>> notification must not violently jump into the middle of the 
>> screen swinging its broadsword, disturbing my circles.
> 
> We might discuss about this feature in the Application Manager. However,
 > if you find this idea useful it would be faster and probably better to
 > start with an installable 3rd party application covering this
 > functionality and targeted to maemo power users.

I checked again. It seems like libcurl can do the "fake HTTP requests to 
at ratings to the application catalog". I already have code for browsing 
package lists. So I should be able to:
* Show list of packages (in user-section) that were not rated or where 
there was a rating for an earlier version (can I re-rate applications if 
the version changed? Should be possible IMHO => Karma!?).
* Request rating (0-5 stars plus free form text).
* Initiate upload of rating(s) using curl and fake HTTP form POSTs.

But:
* There will be no periodic notifications because that would mean to 
always run in the background... or is there a way to do power-safe-aware 
cron jobs!?
* User still has to have an account and must type in password.
* I possibly has to guess the downloads.maemo.org application name from 
the package name. Here we should definitely try to define a header in 
the deb file!

I also would like to have a bug tracking functionality as part of the 
applications, since I have a few users that have problems with the 
package installation.

I could let the user choose the package and then collect information 
about package version, version of dependencies, device model and OS 
version. I could even look for a .desktop file, start the binary and 
collect console output.

And if the rating fake works one could even make a bugzilla ticket from 
it... However in this case we likely needs some help from deb headers, too.

=> I'll do it! Give me some time...

-- 
Gruß...
        Tim