Ubuntu Studio initiative to improve freedesktop categorization in desktop files

[Kaj Ailomaa]

Hello everyone.

I'm Kaj Ailomaa, member of the debian multimedia team, and project lead
of Ubuntu Studio. Recently we have in the Ubuntu Studio dusted off a
plan to improve on the freedesktop categorization in desktop files as
one part of improving application finding. This would probably mean that
we would be making changes to a whole range of desktop files. Most of
them maintained by the debian multimedia team.

Why am I telling you this?

In order to do this work as well as possible, I would appreciate some
feedback, or even help in the matter.

In Ubuntu Studio we have a menu package which adds custom menus for
"workflows" that we have defined, as well as submenus for those. We are
now redefining our workflows, and trying to follow standards as much as
possible. And this will mean that there will be some correlation between
how we design our meta packages, the menu, our custom multimedia package
installer - things like that. This work is not meant to be restricted to
Ubuntu Studio, but to all of Debian - in different ways. Some of our
development work is planned to be packaged in Debian in the future.

As a first step, we are just going to go through all packages in the
Debian sections sound, video and graphics that have desktop files, and
see if want to improve on the freedesktop categorization for those. We
will only be using standard freedesktop categories as defined here -
http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/latest/apa.html, specifically
trying to make use of some of the additional categories - 
http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/latest/apas02.html. 
In some cases we might add one or two custom categories. But, we are not
very clear on the details yet.

The wiki pages that we use are listed on this feature definition page
(packages are actually grouped
by the Debian Sections: sound, graphics, video):
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuStudio/FeatureDefinitions/MultimediaApplicationCategorization

So, the plan is roughly this:
 * We suggest changes to a bunch of desktop files in the wiki pages.
 * When the suggestions are approved by the Ubuntu Studio team (or
 anyone involved), we do bug reports for packages in Debian and in some
 cases in Ubuntu
* I, or anyone interested, do changes to debian multimedia maintained
packages. For other packages I will rely on help from others.

Any thoughts on this?

/Kaj