[ALL] New showroom for Openmoko apps

Fabian Killus fabian at ji-xiansheng.de
Tue Aug 25 12:27:25 CEST 2009


I have spend several hours thinking about how a good application
showroom should look like. Here are some questions I asked myself:

Should the showroom be filled automatically from a repository?
->
YES, we can spend our time better than adding applications and
updating broken ones manually. Distribution maintainers already take
care of this. As proposed by David Reyes Samblas information could be
extracted from bb-files (btw how can one retrieve the bb-files?).
Categorization could be done via .desktop-files.


Do we need Screenshots, Comments, Ratings etc?
->
YES, it should be possible to add screenshots to the automatically
created apps in the showroom or to comment on them.


Should the showroom be SHR/Openembedded only?
->
NO, it should include applications for as many distributions
as possible. Lets assume we want to have SHR and
Gentoo in the showroom (we would have to find a way to automatically
extract applications available on Gentoo).


How should different distributions be combined in the showroom?
->
This is difficult since package information from different repositories
is is likely to differ. That means for example: should we use the
description provided by SHR or the one from Gentoo?
My first thought was, to just use information from SHR and if the same
application is available in a different distro add something like "Also
available for Gentoo". This is flawed however because maybe a package
provided by Gentoo isn't available in SHR and just putting it into "not
categorized" feels wrong.
So im my opinion there should be a showroom for each distribution. This
way it is easy to display distribution specific information on an
application.

Isn't it very inefficient to have several showrooms (one per
distribution)?
->
Not neccessarily. Completely unrelated showrooms would of course result
in additional work. For example one would upload similar or even the
same screenshots several times for different distributions.
A good solution would be to relate these showrooms together. That means
to have a kind of "masterlist" were all applications from all
distributions are collected. Screenshots and comments aren't attached
to an application in a single showroom, but to the name of the
application on the "masterlist". 
When viewing an application on the SHR-showroom displayed information
comes from bb-files, but screenshots and comments come from the
"masterlist". If viewing the same application on the Gentoo-showroom
the same screenshots and comments would be showed, but the application
information and category may differ.

Maybe comments should be tagged so one can toggle between "Show all"
and "Show distribution specific".


Do we want to support more hardware than the Freerunner?
-> 
Definitely yes, or have you forgotten about the neo-gta01 pioneers?
And in case someday gta03/gta02core really materializes it
deserves a place in the showroom, too. However I still have to think
more about supporting multiple hardware. Maybe someone else with good
thoughts on this?

Please excuse my shiftless examples including SHR and Gentoo only,
other distris are great, too ;)

jxs



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