Talk:Task:Package categories

Contents

[edit] Problems

  • There is beauty in simplicity. Adding more categories would never solve the problem for some people. --timsamoff 18:34, 16 October 2008 (UTC)
  • This may be the better method, although "descriptive" is still subjective. --timsamoff 18:34, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Office vs Productivity

Any more thought/discussion on "office" being changed to "productivity"? Or, has this been decided? --timsamoff 13:44, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

It's an i18n question, and so not really important at the moment (i.e. deciding if the categories are sufficient for all use cases). However, IMHO, "Productivity" is a more flawed label than Office as the tablet is a tool. All tools should increase productivity at doing something. People buy physical calendars from office supply firms, Ubuntu (and freedesktop.org) label it "Office" and it encompasses Evolution's calendar; so it works for me. --Jaffa 13:48, 29 October 2008 (UTC)
Makes sense. Good argument that I can stand by. ;) --timsamoff 14:05, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Debtags

I'm not sure if this will help us here. We would need to specify a lot of tags for packages. Question is: how are we going to display this in the application manager or website without being confusing --xfade 12:02, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

We should use Debtags to encode the information we need for Maemo (by defining tags like Maemo::Category), but we probably shouldn't try to expose all the existing Debtags in the UI. This is a slight abuse of Debtags, but better than the current abuse of Section, I think. If the abuse is too great, we can have our own fields in debian/control: Maemo-Category: --mvo

[edit] Defined top-level categories & application-specific subcategories

Alternate lbt+johnx top level categories

Key Example English i18n Example apps
user/desktop Desktop Home, statusbar and taskbar applets
user/development Programming py2deb
user/education Educational Flashcard apps
user/games Games Doom, Duke Nukem 3D
user/graphics Graphics Photo apps, GIMP, Inkscape, fonts
user/multimedia Multimedia or Sound & Video Canola, mplayer, Kagu, UKMP, MediaBox
user/navigation (Location &) Navigation maemo-mapper, Navit
user/network Internet & Networking Web browsers, Samba clients, OpenAFS, Transmission
user/office Office AbiWord, Gnumeric, PDF viewer
user/science Science gnuplot, Octave
user/social Personal and Social GPE and mcalendar (PIM), xchat and Pidgin (IM), claws mail (email), eCoach (personal fitness)
user/system System rotation-support, enhanced kernels, themes
user/utilities Utilities or Accessories Calculators, terminals, text editors

What separates "Personal and Social" from the other categories? The primary purpose of an application in the "Personal and Social" category is for either communicating with other people (Social), working with information about your life (Personal) or both (Personal and Social). An IM app is different than a web browser because a browser is a generic tool for working with things on a network (or maybe communicating), while an IM app is unquestionably for communicating with people.

[edit] Additional categories

We could add more categories to the official list. To do this we need to define a list of categories that need to be added. If we have a list of categories, we need to discuss whether they are really beneficial.

Please add your proposed category, description and motivation here:

desktop: A category for desktop plugins. --xfade 15:13, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Could be a good idea, but what makes this different from "Accessories"? --timsamoff 18:35, 16 October 2008 (UTC)
Accessories -> what would one expect there. I personally think that Accessories is just as bad as Other ;) --xfade 08:20, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
Well, I think the ambiguity comes from developers not using the categories properly, not necessarily from the category names not being descriptiove enough (e.g., currently, we can't even expect the "music" category to have every music-oriented application included anyway). In this case, enforcing the proper use of categorization is more important than the actual category names. --timsamoff 13:09, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Is there a possibility of subcategories? Or, do they all need to be top-level? --timsamoff 18:36, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

To keep with Debian sections, it can only be top-level. (IIRC) --xfade 08:20, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
Eh? We're already not "keeping with Debian sections" by insisting on a "user/" prefix for applications to be exposed to the user. Why is changing that to support "user/multimedia/Canola/themes" (for example) any worse? Or does the Debian policy already allow for the "user/" prefix? --Jaffa 13:12, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
Debian uses the first part for the part of the repo in needs to be in. For example non-free/hamradio will make the package end up in the non-free part of the repo. So Maemo uses an adaption of that idea ;) --xfade 14:17, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
So there's nothing intrinsically stopping us from having extra slashes. Indeed, I can almost perform the mental gymnastics to say we're using it to further sub-divide the repo ;-) --Jaffa 14:22, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

fonts --matan

languages: for packages that add support for other languages. --matan

I think this should be put in 'user/support', no need to add a category for that? --xfade 09:47, 23 October 2008 (UTC)
Yes, I don't think we'll really have enough packages to justify a whole new category just for translation and input support. user/support already covers that stuff anyway. —GeneralAntilles 17:26, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

navigation: Suggested by GA. --xfade 09:47, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Nokia is already using it for a number of their own packages, and considering the type of device we have it makes sense. —GeneralAntilles 17:26, 23 October 2008 (UTC)
"Navigation" seems to be too narrow a definition for a top-level category - why don't we have "Word Processing" instead of Office as "Word Processing" is equally narrow? Navigation-type applications should go into an "Applications" category (which would be distinct from Games, Multimedia, Office etc.), and Applications could/should have a Navigation sub-category if we allow sub-categories. Alternatively create a "Location" top-level category which could include navigation-related applications/packages. —milhouse 13:25, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Utilities, maybe? Question is, what do we do with accessories/tools/utilities, and, perhaps, desktop? —GeneralAntilles 17:26, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Themes, or maybe User Interface: Under the current proposed list, themes go in 'system', which I think is unintuitive. --ian_r 21:27, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Aliases

Because Debian uses different terms (e.g. comm) to describe the same (e.g. Communication) the former could be made an alias for the latter. While this wouldn't solve the problem completely, its at least a (small) start. It can be hard-coded in the packages themself, or in the Application Manager instead.

[edit] Freshmeat

Freshmeat manages a big database of software, and have had their own (sub)-categories allowing one to search for one or more programs falling under specific definitions such as programming langauge used or what network protocols it uses. It appears the Debtags are some kind of advanced/extensive subset of this, providing also metadata for a search engine?

[edit] Filter

Some kind of blacklist filter (on category) to define what one is interested in might also work. For example, I'm glad people can run their old legacy games on the NIT, but I really don't give a rat about them, so I don't want to see all these emulators for these ancient consoles. Likewise, I imagine some folks wouldn't be interested in say CLI applications. Or GPS applications.

allnameswereout, please remember to sign your comments with —~~~~, otherwise it's very difficult to know who you're responding to. This really belongs over here, anyway. —GeneralAntilles 15:27, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Question

Question: link http://maemo.org/midcom-permalink-8431f58cb10511dda6cc5b17a7e6a198a198 claims that translations are needed. But this Wiki claims that task is completed.

However I can't see RU_ru language here so far in languages table. I can help with translation into Russian language if needed since Russian is my native language. But I can't figure out if there is still help needed or task has been completed and I'm too late.

fms provided an ru_RU translation, it's towards the right end of the table. The translation is still ongoing, but the task task the October Sprint to compile a new list of package categories is completed. Somewhat confusing I guess, but so it goes. ;) —GeneralAntilles 02:57, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Example apps

I like the restricted category list, but I'm wondering - is the list of example apps in Task:Package_categories#New_list_for_Diablo set in stone? The reason I ask is that I think themes should be in desktop, not system. I wasn't sure if I was allowed to edit the page. --pelago 00:18, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

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