Task:Package categories

This wiki page serves as a discussion page where we will try to find a better way to categorize packages in the repositories.

This proposal is coordinated by Niels Breet and is part of the Extras repository process definition.

Problem
People feel the need to create new categories, because the current list is too limited.

Another problem is that some categories aren't very descriptive. What applications go in to tools, support or accessories?

Maemo Packaging Policy
The current Maemo Packaging Policy lists the following sections:


 * accessories
 * communication
 * games
 * multimedia
 * office
 * other
 * programming
 * support
 * themes
 * tools

New list for Diablo
This is the proposed final list for Diablo:

If the package's section starts "user/", but is not any of the above, the Application Manager forces them into an "Other" section.

Future additions
The current proposed list is only for Diablo, future additions and changes will be considered for Fremantle.

Debtags
Debian Package Tags: Faceted Classification

As stated on the debtags website:

''Drawing a bit freely from the literature of Faceted Classification, a facet is a group of tags which describe the same quality of a package. Package Tags are organized in Facets, that represent different points of view from which to look at the package archive. For example, you could have a "Usage" facet with tags about what a program is intended to be used for, or you could have a "Media" facet with tags about what kind of information a program is able to process, a "Technology" facet about the technology a package uses, and so on. With this approach, every tag is situated in a specific context, and has a clear meaning. Also, tags from different facets shed light on packages from different points of view, giving "depth" to its categorization. Take something tagged with "Use::Chatting", "Technology::IRC", "Role::Server": it has a remarkable level of detail, and tells almost everything we need to know about what the package does.''

Application-specific subcategories
Within each of the top-level categories, projects may want to group a number of packages together. For this, sub-sections can be used. For example, Canola may have:

The rule is simple:
 * 1) If the portion of the section path starts with a capital letter, it is shown as-is
 * 2) Otherwise the portion of the section path must be one of the above sections or, additionally:
 * 3) * themes
 * 4) * plugins
 * 5) * translations

freedesktop.org
The basic, rationalised, set of high-level sections according to the freedesktop.org menu specification are: Accessories, Development, Education, Game, Graphics, Multimedia, Network, Office, Settings, System.

Debian
The Debian archive maintainers provide the authoritative list of sections. At present, they are: admin, comm, devel, doc, editors, electronics, embedded, games, gnome, graphics, hamradio, interpreters, kde, libs, libdevel, mail, math, misc, net, news, oldlibs, otherosfs, perl, python, science, shells, sound, tex, text, utils, web, x11.

Previous discussions

 * Communitizer blog
 * Mandatory categories discussion