Applications¶

Needs : there are many many packages.

Simple plan : applications vs other packages¶

An application is just a special kind of package. A package is either an application or isn't.

In this simple view, desktop environments, CLI packages, GUI packages, are all seen as applications.

Here is what we do for now : applications are packages which :

do not begin with "lib"
do not begin with "locales-"
do not end with "-devel"
do not end with "-debug"

How can we improve that ?

use dependencies (no package depends on an application, except for some meta-packages)
see how rpmdrake differentiates GUI applications from other packages
use a blacklist and a white list to override from the above rules, and let some contributors manage the lists.

Other ideas ?

Other (complementary plan) : use package popularity to sort results¶

Even when a request gives many packages which all got the "application" flag, sorting by package popularity (provided we have a way to measure it) can help to show the most sensible results first. It's a bit like Google's pagerank system.

Prospective studies :¶

Group similar packages together¶

See :

Separate into more categories¶

GUI applications
CLI applications
server packages
desktop environments / window managers
kernels and drivers
core system components

This can a bit redundant with package groups, but not totally.

It's really hard to categorize easily