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Task:Package categories

This is an ongoing task, planned to be completed during the current maemo.org development sprint. Any help is appreciated! Please see the talk page for discussion.

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.

• There is beauty in simplicity. Adding more categories would never solve the problem for some people. --timsamoff 18:34, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

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

• This may be the better method, although "descriptive" is still subjective. --timsamoff 18:34, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Maemo Packaging Policy

The current Maemo Packaging Policy lists the following sections:

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

Proposed 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.

• 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)

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.

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

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:
   • themes
   • plugins
   • translations

Reference

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

Bugs