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 _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community