Here is my first suggestion to clean up the complete mess we have at the moment when it comes to package categories in the maemo extras repository. There is no official list of categories, which has brought us to state we are in now.
We have these nice categories for example: 'Boingo', 'Canola'. Those should never be a category by themselves. We also have a lot of duplicates like 'cli' ,'Commandline' and 'Web','www' and 'Utilities','utils'.
This really has to stop as this is confusing for end users. We, the maemo community, need to find a solution and fix this.
If we look at Debian, we can see that they have the following list of
categories:
admin, base, comm, contrib, devel, doc, editors, electronics, embedded, games, gnome, graphics, hamradio, interpreters, kde, libs, libdevel, mail, math, misc, net, news, non-free, oldlibs, otherosfs, perl, python, science, shells, sound, tex, text, utils, web, x11
My suggestion would be to base our list off the Debian list and remove the categories that are not suitable for Maemo. We might also want to add some categories if we find some missing.
admin, comm, devel, doc, editors, games, graphics, interpreters, mail, net, news, utils
and add:
desktop, database, education, internet, multimedia, office, scientific, security, system, travel
Please feel free to suggest other categories. Try to keep them as broad as possible. I would really like to get a list of categories where every application can be in at least one category. It would be nice not to need the 'misc' or 'other' category.
Perhaps it would also be a good idea to have the Application Manager display the pretty name for each category. e.g. comm -> Communication. That might be step 2 though.
I also would like your feedback on this idea:
"For diablo we only accept packages in the extras/extras-devel repositories when they have a valid category."I'm really not sure if we can do this in time for diablo, but at least we can try to get the community to agree on this. I don't think we can do anything for existing repositories, but at least we could try for the new ones.
Please respond with your ideas in the comments section, but keep it to the category subject only.
Edit:There seems to be a
list of categories for the Application Manager. I don't think that list has enough categories, but it is a start.