A PackageKit browser plugin

[Robin Norwood]

On Fri, 25 Jul 2008 00:44:34 -0800
"Jeff Spaleta" <jspaleta at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 6:17 PM, Robin Norwood <rnorwood at redhat.com>
> wrote:
> > The target audiences are different.
> 
> If you are driving users to a different site than the package
> maintainers... and allowing them to comment...you are going to cause a
> communication gap. A driveby commenting and rating system among users
> where the maintainers are not encouraged to also interact with...does
> nothing to get that feedback to the people who are doing the work. Nor
> does it help those of us doing the work figure out which of our users
> are worth encouraging to take the next step and start helping.  Make
> the same site expose specific functionality for users, and
> contributors.  There's really no reason I should not be able to use
> the exact same website to see user comments on my packages...and do
> the packagedb interactions which lets me elevate other
> contributors/users as co-maintainers on those very same packages.
> If i have to go to yet another website to see what users are saying
> about my packages, I will most likely end up forgetting to do
> it...even though I actually care.
> Focusing an interface strickly for users...doesn't help us inteact
> with users in a way that actually matters. Users talking among
> themselves does not lead to better package quality nor additional
> contributor manpower.
> 
> If you want to make a better package browsing interface...great...do
> it as an extension to the SAME website that I have to already interact
> with to do my ownership/watching packagedb manipulation as a
> contributor.

I really don't think that a monolithic app is the way to go - serving
two masters and all that.  OTOH, I'm not trying to build an ivory tower
either.  I'm already integrating with the rest of the fedora
infrastructure to get the package data and FAS.  I'm also planning to
include easy export of the data.  So, for instance, the packagedb could
have a 'feed' of comments about a given package.  More of a semantic
web type idea than an isolated database or a 'one-stop shop'.

-RN

-- 
Robin Norwood
Red Hat, Inc.

"The Sage does nothing, yet nothing remains undone."
-Lao Tzu, Te Tao Ching