gnome app pages (was confusingly Gnome Software Map)

[Gergely Nagy <greg gnome hu>]

Hi,

All right, so let's get back to basics :)

Clearly, for these pages to make some sense at all, there has to be some
added value. Let's try to enumerate these first...

- authoritative
by this i mean it will be the hopefully best maintained and relevant
info source on an application relevant to gnome. People will of course
be free to create an "official" website for their app, and publish it as
they see fit. Yet, the wgo app pages would appear in a more-or-less
uniform fashion, with some established guidelines. It will be possible
to make it a collaborative effort, where several people can make sure
the page is up do date and meeting some standards.

Perhaps the "official" web page will be more up-to-date, because
Changelogs appear within microseconds of a release, but people browsing
wgo/apps will hopefully get a uniform and still valid resource to
discover gnome apps.

In addition, it just looks more professional if you can reference a core
gnome app by an official gnome URL, may it be on an about box, manual,
banner, flier, blimp, super bowl, or other marketing blurb :)

- translated
The wgo infrastructure will offer the possibility to translate these
pages. Arguably these will not be the first pages translated, but I
believe it is a useful feature.

- detail and structure

we determine how such an app page is structured and what appears on it.
This will enhance interoperability, and give a uniform appeal of all the
pages. We cannot except this from "official" sites. (yeah, gnomefiles
has structure, but it has a different scope, and will never have all the
details we might need)

- scope
I imagine the app pages to be _not_ a "software map", that is a database
trying to list all gnome-relevant software. And in this respect I see no
competition with gnomefiles.org, on the contrary, an opportunity to
cooperate.

The exact policy on what to include here is up for discussion, but the
principal guideline should be what is most relevant for gnome. Again,
this is not the scope of gnomefiles.org, where the focus is on as many
apps as possible. Another policy can be to include only mature apps,
whereas gnomefiles can host them as soon as they release 0.0.1-alpha.
Also, on wgo we can convey default app policy, say our media player _is_
totem, whereas gnomefiles.org would obviously do no such thing.

It is also not a projects page, trac [1] style. Once we come around to
do prgo, we can just use these project management frameworks, off the
shelf. Their focus is to drive development efforts, and they do it well.
They do wikis, issue tracking, project management (timelines,
milestones, roadmaps, etc), repository integration, etc.

I see wgo/apps/ page as an about box on steroids. It would be _the_ pace
to go to find out some basic info about a gnome app. You can go to
gnomefiles.org to see what else is out there, or the project pages to
get in the gory details, or the "official" page to see that too, if you
want. The thing is, not all apps have an official page, esp. core gnome
apps...

- integration

So how can we integrate with other resources?

We can display the feed from gnomefiles.org and link there, to channel
visitors looking for the myriad of apps out there. We can link to, or
possibly slurp some data from the projects pages. Gnomefiles could be
used for general searching for apps, or displaying similar apps (e.g.
based on their categores), etc.

We can integrate with the apps, in the about box, bug-buddy, manual
pages, etc. For example, the intro of an app could be authored together
with the manual, and extracted for the wgo page. Or if the manual pages
ever go online, they could be truly cross-referenced.

We can also integrate with distros. Point users at them for installing
or any distro-specific issues, such as support. Distros could point back
to us as "upstream", say in package info files...


- all your app are not belong to us

since gnomefiles.org already exists, and does a great job, it does not
make sense to create a host'em all apps site. we should only focus on
truly gnomey apps :)

Greg

[1] http://trac.edgewall.org/