Improving maemo.org Downloads

As part of my tasks in the January 2009 Sprint for maemo.org, I want to gather improvement ideas for downloads.maemo.org. A list of improvements that I have come up with can be found at the wiki page. If you have ideas on how we can make Downloads work better for you or have some cool feature you want to have added, please add them to this wiki page.

At the end of this Sprint, I will pick some of the ideas to which I will commit for the next Sprint. Some items that have been added to the wiki page already are:

Category reorg

We had long discussions about what packages categories to use. Implementation and deployment is currently blocked by bug #1805. The current catalog still shows a mostly randomly-selected list of categories. It should be reorganized to use the official list of categories agreed on by the community.

OS200x vs Maemo x

In the past Nokia referred to OS releases OS2007, OS2008, etc. The use of OS200x has been deprecated in favor of Maemo x (e.g., Fremantle is Maemo 5). The catalog is currently organized by OS200x, this needs to be changed to the new versioning scheme.

Automatically create entries in Downloads when package in Extras has user/* section

At the moment not all applications which are available in Extras are listed in Downloads. A script could gather basic information for all user applications in Extras and create entries in the catalog. These entries can later be updated by users to give more details about the application.

Add Application Manager install failures feedback to downloads

There is a plan to integrate install status feedback into the Application Manager. Downloads could use statistics from installation failures to display the "quality" of a package.

Packaging Policy change proposal

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.