Ubuntu Wiki

Essentially I would like to have the website being able to replace add/remove just by using apt:$packagename uris. The way I think it could work would be to have something like

http://apps.ubuntu.com/hardy

That would then display a search bar and a nice web page that shows a overview based on the categories of the packages (Education, Games, Graphics, ...). The data is all available in the app-install-data package. When the user clicks on a category, he sees the individual applications with sort options (popularity, alphabetic). So essentially how gnome-app-install works now. If he clicks on the details, there is the usual description/icon.

In addition to the stuff that g-a-i already offers I would like to add:

• screenshots (a lot of them can be auto-generated I think - I have some code for this. Screenshot uploads by trusted members would be cool.)
• comments (with the ability to remove them again)
• ratings (a new rating in addition to the popcon stuff we use now)

Revelant UB idea: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/103/

Existing examples:

• http://linuxmint.com/software/?sec=categories&release=3

• http://www.gnomefiles.org/

• http://online.gnome.org/applications

• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=70386

• http://ubuntuforums.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=2640&d=1128033809

• http://www.cnr.com/

• http://en.opensuse.org/Build_Service

• http://software.opensuse.org/search?baseproject=ALL&p=1&q=kdevelop

• http://en.opensuse.org/Standards/One_Click_Install

Notes:

• Just applications, not libraries.
• Initially, just for officially-packaged applications.
• Desktop files already have meta-data.
• The Ubuntu Brainstorm website has some similar functionality already (users, comments, categories, rating). Reuse?
• Auto-detect OS/distro
• having independent voting for openoffice/hardy and openoffice/dapper
• Launchpad's XML-RPC API can (or could soon) provide a list of applications, plus application details. Ask in #launchpad - Elliot Murphy (statik) or Leonard Richardson (leonardr).But app-install-data maybe has all that's needed already.

• Allow users to improve application descriptions and translate them (even into English).This could also be in Launchpad (there is a rosetta spec for this at: https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/rosetta/+spec/native-package-descriptions-support)

• Guidelines on how to write useful package descriptions. [one that exists: http://people.debian.org/~walters/descriptions.html]

• Provide screenshots (but make clear what the copyright license for these will be).