Re: New Trove Software Map test version available

[Gregory Leblanc <gleblanc linuxweasel com>]

On Sat, 2001-09-15 at 22:13, Steve Fox wrote:
> Check out http://gnome.foxhut.org/softwaremap/

This is an amazing piece of work, thanks Steve!  Comments below...

> What's working (at least in part :)
> -----------------------------------
> 
> You can browse the map by topic (topics are the only categories filled
> in, each project will have to fill in their own for the rest of them).

What are the other categories that need to get filled in?

> I'm sure I messed up quite a few of these, so let me know if an app
> should go in a different location. 

This is actually slightly confusing the way that it's implemented now. 
Here's the path I followed:
Browse the software map by category
click on Communications
Click on Email
get confused because there are both applications, and sub-categories
here.  

Now, I can clearly see that some of these categories need to be able to
hold both applications and sub-categories, but I think the current
structure of the page makes it easy to "miss" the applications,
especially on pages where there are a lot of sub-categories listed. 
Actually, it looks like there's an application listed on the
"Communications" page, which I missed completely.  It just barely shows
up at the bottom of a 1024x768 window, at 800x600 it would be completely
off that page.  Unfortunately, I don't know what a good "fix" for this
is, but perhaps somebody else on this list has some ideas.  

> You can click on a project and go to a "project information" page, just
> like SourceForge shows under /projects/[project name]. This page is very
> incomplete. I basically just fixed it up enough to remove most of the
> stuff we won't be using. You will also see a list of hackers for each

How hard will it be to add the last release of a project to this page? 
It looks rather odd with nothing there just yet.

I'd like to see the links to the "Home Page Project Home Page" moved
into a "header", someplace perhaps just below the name of the program
(can we get that put above the description?).  It might be nice to have
a link to screenshots near the link to the homepage as well.  What do
you think?

> You can click on a developer's name to view their user information. This
> will just show basic stuff, but I am planning to add a feature to upload
> a picture. Also the skills profile stuff isn't done yet. 

That's pretty cool.

> What needs to be done
> ---------------------
> 
> Lots of stuff! :) But I will just list immediate stuff that I could use
> help with.
> 
> We need to add/remove/rename/move the categories around a bit and create
> new ones that are lacking. There were a few apps that I had a difficult
> time finding a category for. I created a Utilities top-level category,
> but I think we could use several more subcategories than the two that I
> created.

Are the categories stored in the database?  If so, is it possible to
structure the querries so that they don't show topic's that have 0
projects when you're browsing by category by default?  I suddenly
realized that I'm confusing myself here.  Where should I be using the
"category" term, and where should I be using the "topic" term?

> Need to browse around the map and make sure that I didn't mistakenly put
> things in the wrong categories.

I wouldn't worry too much about this, we should be able to get program
authors to fix some of this themselves.  This will distribute the
workload nicely, so that it's zillions of tiny jobs, rather than a huge
job.

> Test things like the filters, etc. Make sure that it basically "works".

Well, filters don't seem to work for me... 
http://gnome.foxhut.org/softwaremap/trove_list.php?form_cat=28&discrim=271 
gives me an error that there's an unknown table "trove_agg" in the where
clause.  

> Miscellaneous Ramblings
> -----------------------
> 
> There was a LOT of crap in the old applist. I hope no one will want to
> kick me in the nads for this, but I made the decision to not import any
> application which has not made a release this year. If someone would
> like to add their application back into the Software Map, it is very
> easy to do so. We will make big noise when it's complete, so hopefully
> they should figure out if they were dropped (and maybe encourage them to
> make a new release)

It needs to be easy to add and remove projects from the software map, so
I'm not particularly concerned about getting everything moved over, as
we can fix it later if it's easy to add/remove/change programs.  

> Let me know what you all think.

Bad ass!  Hopefully I don't come across too hard, I'm trying to make my
comments as constructive as possible.  Thanks for all your hard work,
	Greg