Package tags for Debian-Lex

[Erich Schubert]

(Full-Quoting Enrico, since his reply seems to have gone to the list
only, which you maybe havn't subscribed)

Enrico Zini wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 03, 2003 at 02:24:41PM +0800, Jeremy Malcolm wrote:
> 
> > Here are some proposed package tags for the Debian-Lex sub-project:
> 
> I quite lack the necessary knowledge to summarize your proposals in a
> short tag, nor the experience necessary to undertand wether they
> represent an atomic, generally valid concept or they can be made by
> combining legal-specific tags with other tags already present:

Also i'm not sure about the amount of "legal"-related packages in debian
right now. Maybe there will be more, but maybe they'll be kept in a
separate repository. If so, the tags should be "mostly" used there only.

> > [Lex] Legal Software : Legal Office Administration
> 
> legal::office or "legal, office" ?

I'm quite unsure about this tag. Would this, for example, be attached to
openoffice? If so i'm definitely against introducing this tag:
openoffice doesn't have anything specific to legal issues; that legal
offices might want to use regular office software probably isn't enough
to justify this tag.
Same applies to many other of these tags.

> > [Lex] Legal Software : Practice Management
> 
> legal::practice-management ?
> 
> > [Lex] Legal Software : Document Management
> 
> Can it be just document-management outside of a "legal" context?  Or
> maybe "legal, document-management", with the addition of a
> "document-management" tag as well.
> 
> > [Lex] Legal Software : Court Administration
> 
> legal::court
> 
> > [Lex] Legal Software : Legal Research
> 
> Could it be expressed by a combination of "legal" and something related
> to search engines?
> 
> > [Lex] Legal Software : Legal Subjects : Taxation Law
> 
> taxation-law
> 
> > [Lex] Legal Software : Legal Systems : Common Law
> 
> common-law
> 
> > [Lex] Legal Software : Legal Systems : Code/Civil Law
> 
> civil-law
> 
> > [Lex] Legal Software : Legal Systems : Other Legal Systems
> 
> What do you mean with "other legal systems"?

> I'd suggest that when those tags are specific of debian-lex, you should
> consider trying installing a tag patch enabling them in debian-lex
> installations (I'm willing to help you in that process).

Or use such a patch in a separate repository, if used.

> Instead, with your experience with legal things you could help in
> defining and assigning tags to legal-related packages: many of the tags
> you proposed could as well be generally valid outside of a debian-lex
> environment.

> > I am a bit unclear about why Tasks couldn't have been modified to serve
> > the purpose of Tags.  Since woody, can't Tasks already do most of what
> > Tags do?  If we are supposed to use Tags in preference to Tasks, should
> > Tasks be deprecated?
> 
> I consider them two completely different things: tasks are used to
> install specific groups of packages, while tags are used to give
> more structure to the package database.  With tags you enhance the
> navigation of the package database, but tags are not involved in
> automatic selections of what packages should be installed.

I agree, and this shows that there still is a lot of confusion about
what tags do and what tasks do. Maybe we should add some kind of FAQ on
this:
- Tasks are for quickly installing a set of packages in order to
provide a certain environment
- Tags are to find packages suiteable for some specific purpose
this is a /negative/ selection process!
-> Instead of "installing packages that have some task" you "/hide/
packages that do not have some property"

> > Are Tags going to be added to the Policy Manual?
> 
> We definitely hope so; however, I'd like to wait until some tools start
> to make use of them before thinking about policy proposals, so that the
> policy could be augmented based on established practice and/or real
> problems that need to be solved.
> 
> So far, since afaik there is nothing that makes use of tags besides
> Erich's Package Browser and my tools, it means that all existing tools
> are doing their job without needing a policy change.  I hope the
> situation will change soon, though, altough I don't have the time at the
> moment to work on patching existing tools to use tags.
> 
> 
> > The other question is whether Debian-Lex and the other [sub|meta]-
> > projects should add their categories to the main package tags database
> > or whether to maintain our own separate and privately-maintained package
> > tag databases which we would install into the tags.d directory.  If the
> > latter, would the tag package have to be a dependency in any package
> > tagged with one of its tags? 
> 
> I'd go with the latter, and no, there's no need for such a dependency,
> since a package can work perfectly without knowing how it has been
> tagged.  The only dependency scheme I could see is this:
> 
> Package: debian-lex-tags
> Description: Tag patches to introduce debian-lex specific package tags
> Depends: debtags
>   (this dependancy might even be unneeded, and the package could just
>   put the patch there in case debtags gets installed in some future)
> 
> Package: debian-lex-common  (or whatever)
> Depends: debian-lex-tags
> 
> That is, debian-lex brings in its customizations to the tag database, so
> that if debtags is installed, the package tags will be smoothly
> consistent with the debian-lex flavour of the system.
> 
> 
> Ciao,
> 
> Enrico

If you want to add certain tags, please do send me
- a vocabulary file (Tag, Title, Long Description, Implications)
- a tags diff (see "tagcoll", to give me an example of packages that
should be tagged. i can import these into the web database)

The vocabulary file is very important. This is what the "tags task
force" will have to do: define clean policies when a tag may or may not
be added.

Tags can be difficult to define; since you have been citing the
Debian-Jr project, i'll try to give you the definition of "junior" in my
opinion, and why i like to have this tag)
The "junior" tag should be used whenever a package has been reviewed and
was considered an application recommended to be used by "junior" users
without parental supervision.
This could go further, two tags would be useful:
"recommended-for-juniors" and "suiteable-for-juniors"

If you want tags for debian-lex, please design them with this
interpreation in mind:
- maybe add some tag "recommended-for-lex" (but i think tasks should be
used for this, not tags!)
- use some tag "suiteable-for-lex" (or better: "not-suiteable-for-lex",
because there will probably fewer packages that are best-to-be-avoided
here. Maybe some Scientology-developed software and such, or software
with risky licences and patents)
- "topic" tags like "legal:taxation" to classify packages "written" to
to be used for such activites.

Enrico: we'll need easy options to "ignore" certain tags. Me for example
i don't want subgroups to be made for "suiteable-for-legal",
"recommended-for-junior" and such - they won't help me deciding wheter
i'd like to install some package.

Greetings,
Erich