[Pardus-devel] Idea for Package-Manager

[Faik Uygur]

On Tuesday 03 July 2007 20:58:35 Michael Austin wrote:
> Hello Everyone,

Hi Michael,

Thanks for sharing the idea. :)

> I was looking at the CNR service that Linspire are developing that
> will cover a number of distributions, not just their own Linspire and
> Freespire [1].  The screenshots section [2] gave me an idea for future
> development of Package-Manager.
>
> On the screenshots you can see there is the package name, description,
> version and other information.  In addition to these you can see there
> is a screenshot of the application.  This is the part that gave me the
> idea.
>
> My idea is that Package-Manager should continue to show the package
> name, description, package size, version number and link to home page,
> but in addition the chosen package should display a screenshot of the
> chosen application.
>
> My idea is that Package-Manager should display a small scaled down
> version of the screenshot, and clicking it opens a larger version.  To
> cater for those with low bandwidth connections the small image could
> open link to a larger version from the internet.  The small scalaed
> down version could be cached locally like the package list.  To
> further cater for low bandwidth users, the screenshots could be
> disabled, meaning no screenshots are displayed or downloaded and
> cached.
>
> The images could be low quality jpeg images.  During the build process
> on the build server, the images could be scaled using imagemagik or
> something similar.  Each developer could take a screenshot of the
> application and then add to the pspec of the package.  Then commit the
> image along with the pspec, actions and other files.

This is a nice idea that we also discussed about some time ago. But the 
problem is where to keep these images. If we put these images inside the 
package, than package-manager can not display these images until it downloads
the package. But we want to see the screenshots to decide to download and 
install a package.

Currently package-manager is html based. We have a web site project called 
ozgurlukicin.com ("forfreedom.com") and there we are planning to put reviews 
and screenshots of applications. When it is finished (if it will :) ) then 
maybe somehow we can connect that portal with the package-manager.

Regards,
- Faik