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Ratings and reviews implementation

On 2010-02-03 mvo and barry sketched out a design to support ratings and reviews for Lucid (an LTS). Here are our notes.

Overview

We're going to (ab)use Launchpad answers as the database for ratings and reviews. Every reviewable application will be linked to a question and we'll store individual reviews as comments in the question. User reviews will be inputted on the desktop through Software Center and will be submitted directly to Launchpad via the API. We'll deploy a new service, likely called reviews.ubuntu.com that will provide application reviews via HTTP GET as one big file of XML. reviews.ubuntu.com will talk to LP API to access and collate question comments to prevent hammering the LP database, because it can cache the read-only XML review files.

Mapping applications to questions

Questions have a number and are associated with a language. We need to map reviewable applications on the desktop to a question number. We'll do this with a 4-tuple of:

• package_name - the binary package name
• application name - the application name. this is necessary because binary
  • packages can contain more than one application
• application version - the (major.minor?) version number of the application
  • on the desktop
• distro name - e.g. Lucid

This mapping will not be stored explicitly in LP. Instead, reviews.u.c will maintain the mapping and use HTTP and URL trickery to expose this mapping to Software Center.

Downloading reviews for display

When Sheila wants to view the reviews for Emacs.

XXX