bug#25227: [Website] Package-related pages redesign proposal

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hello!

Luis Felipe López Acevedo <felipe.lopez@openmailbox.org> skribis:

> On 2016-12-19 02:35, Alex Sassmannshausen wrote:
>> Hi Luis,
>>
>> Luis Felipe López Acevedo writes:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I was thinking on improving the package-related pages, and made these
>>> mockups:
>>>
>>>
>>> Figure 1. Package list page.
>>> https://multimedialib.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/guixsd-package-list-view-v0.png

Awesome, I really like both mockups!

>> Previous discussions centered around how difficult it is to maintain
>> categories for packages.  I think if we went this way we'd want to
>> implement some form of deductive faceting, where we parse
>> description/synopsis and try to generate keywords.  But that sounds
>> like
>> it could quite easily become a can of worms…
>
>
> If that is not possible, we can just ignore it for now :)

We already have categories for GNU packages, and in theory it might be
possible to get categories for non-GNU packages from the FSD
(directory.fsf.org).

But that’s just theory, so yes, probably best to keep it as future
work.  :-)

In the meantime, we can try to find Someone willing to see how we could
get data from the FSD.

> Seeing the way the current logos from GNU packages are handled, I'm
> not optimist about having logos for non-GNU packages and screenshots
> for applications, any time soon. Too much manual work indeed. So I
> think we can ignore images, to keep it simple.

Agreed.

In the future, we could also try to get logos and screenshot from some
other database: FSD, Debian/Ubuntu, WikiData, etc.

> So I see that some parts of the design could be used in the current
> static site, advanced filtering and search may have to wait for a
> dynamic site, logos and screenshots may be a can of worms.

I’ve started a discussion with the Savannah folks (Cc’d you) to see
whether/how we could have those pages generated on the server side.

Thank you for the great work!

Ludo’.