After long and heated discussions, we finally managed to finish the Better Package Categories task. When I started the discussion in April, I knew it would not be an easy task. It remained on my task lists over a lot of sprints, but now we have a result.
Ryan posted about this and proposed future in his blog.
"So, what's next?"
Now we need to get these proposed changes accepted into the Packaging Policy, so we can start to apply them. I created a wiki page for the proposed changes to the policy. Please see if you would like to see the wording changed. I will push this task for the November 2008 Sprint.
The autobuilder and Extras Assistant will soon start to give warnings when your package is not using one of the official categories. These warnings will not prevent you from uploading your package, but please try to update your package to make it comply with the policy.
As we are going to change the policy, the wiki page might also be a good place to propose other changes you would like to see in the document.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
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3 comments:
7 month to come up with a list of 10 categories????? Common'!!
Sometime at nokia should just decide and act instead of going through endless discussions on a mailing list.
If it took me 7 month to come up with a 10 item list I would have lost my job a long time ago (or my company would have filled for bankruptcy).
Another detail: I have just flashed my Nokia N810 to Diablo. And guess what? In the default application manager you already have "Navigation" and "navigation" as categories...
Then I enabled the Maemo extras. Woua! Such a mess! Couln't someone have taken care of this earlier?
And even with better categories, who will do the cleanup so that I don't have tens of duplicates for some pieces of software? (please count the number of zip/unzip packages in Maemo extras. Don't you think the end user will be lost?)
Don't get me wrong. I love the N810 and the maemo project. I appreciate the Open Source commitment of Nokia. But when I bought the N810 I thought it would be a polished device (software speaking). It is definitively not and I fear it won't be for the couple next years.
@nicolas
Yeah, we get that people are always ready to tell you how to paint the barn, but rarely actually want to help you do it. :)
Realistically speaking, it really only took about 1 month in total to get the new list, there was just a large break in the middle where other issues took precedence.
Besides, most of this work was done by unpaid volunteers. You can't fire those. :)
If you'll bother to read my post on the topic, you'd understand why the categories didn't instantly change.
I don't see any issues with duplicate packages in Extras. If there are two packages that seem similar, it's because they aren't actually the same. . . .
Thank you for your un-constructive input.
Mer's Hildon Application Manager is built from newer upstream sources than Diablo, and includes two changes which massively improve its usability:
* Show categories in a grid
* Don't show categories which don't have a translation. This has the side effect of not permitting the proliferation of categories that Nicolas is talking about.
For a screenshot, see: http://www.flegg.org/~andrew/mer-ham-03.png
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