introduction and status debtags

[Alex de Landgraaf]

Hey Enrico, Erich et al,

Looking around at the current state of available packagemanagers (have a
love-hate relationship with synaptic), I stumbled upon your debtags-project,
which I remembered some time ago from a DWN item. Back when your project was
just started, mine (Morphix) was only just underway and I was focusing more on
getting those blasted modules to work together. Now however I'm looking more
into (semi)automatic module/iso generating, which is currently done using
scripts to convert lists of packages (plaintext, with module-information
available via xml). Moreso, we've been discussing how to make package selection
easier for users.

Adding extra semantical information about packages, what debtags tries to do,
seems enevitable for a 'meta-distro' like Morphix (I was pleasantly surprised
that it was mentioned on the debtags webpage :) and I believe that it would
make
the large body of packages in Debian a lot more accessable, however, it seems
like developments have stalled somewhat. I have many questions and see quite a
few interesting applications (both for Morphix and more general in use), but
what is the current state of debtags? Has there been any progress in merging
similar efforts (saw something about FAI, tasksel, meta-packages) into debtags,
and in merging debtags into debian/control?

Cheers, 

Alex
www.morphix.org