Comment 2 for bug 546945

The Debian Policy Manual lists the Section values it allows, but does not define any of them. <http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-archive.html#s-subsections> Is there any other document which does define them? If there isn't, then mere compliance with the policy does not necessarily mean the current Section value is the most appropriate one.

When defining how Ubuntu Software Center should map Debian Sections to categories <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter#Genre>, I took the approach that the Section values matching names of programming languages represented packages that were useful to programmers wanting to develop software in those particular languages. Try out the "Developer Tools" section in software-center 1.1.16 or later to see how this works. It works very well for "cli-mono" (apart from bug 546936), "haskell", "java", "lisp", "ocaml" and and fairly well for "ruby". It doesn't work so well for "perl" or "python" yet, because quite a few packages -- including agtl -- have been given those Section values when they have little or nothing to do with software development.

Since Debian now uses the Software Center code too <http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/software-center.html>, it would be useful for Ubuntu and Debian to agree on this definition of those Section values, instead of having (a) even more Section overrides in Ubuntu and (b) inappropriately categorized packages in Debian Software Center (or even worse, no easy way for Python developers to find packages relevant to them). I'd be happy to have that discussion with the relevant Debian developers, but I doubt a bug report would be the most constructive place for it. Perhaps you could suggest a better venue?

BTW, when marking a bug report as Incomplete, it's best to specify exactly what information is missing.