We (in maemo team) have received some negative feedback about the quality of the current Application Catalog on maemo.org. Among other things people complained that some install files do not work and they can not install the selected applications at all.

The Application Catalog is pretty much like a wiki page: the community members are inserting the content there, and as the name implied it is only a catalog of links, most of which are pointing to 3rd party pages and repositories outside of the maemo.org domain. As part of the general maemo.org site improvement process we decided to come up with a solution that automatically checks that the links provided in the Catalog are alive and correct.

I created a script that uses the Application Catalog API to walk through all the items in maemo.org/downloads and checks:

• if the provided .install files are accessible, then fetches the install files and
• tries to install the application in a fake ARMEL environment.
  

It is a work in progress, because the sript still miss the functionality to notify the owners of the applications where problems are found and it was not tested very extensively. Since in bora and before install files can contain only one repository some failures might be caused by the fact that the application depends on some other package which is in a different repository, but it is a good start anyhow.The script will be executed regularly and the owners of the problematic applications will be notified. The result of the latest run can be found here:

http://garage.maemo.org/docman/view.php/106/295/inst.html

If you have applications in the Application Catalog, please take a look and check if your application passed the test or not.

• Green background means everything was working fine
• White background means that the application was not tested for some reason
• Red background means that there were some issues

If you have components in multiple repositories we recommend that you move them to one repository or give very good instructions about required repositories. Give us feedback how we should solve this problem?