introduction and status debtags

[Enrico Zini]

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On Thu, Nov 13, 2003 at 10:58:08PM +0100, Alex de Landgraaf wrote:

> 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.
[...]
> 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?

Uhm... there is some misunderstanding about the scope of the package
tags thing: it's not intended to be a package manager at all, but just a
new set of metadata in Debian.

Someone could then use these metadata to improve existing package
managers, as they would allow things like document-vector searches,
similarity searches, new ways of interactive filtering packages.

However, debtags is just about putting this new metadata inside Debian,
finding ways of maintaining it and study nice algorithms to do dice
things with them.

> 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?

Debtags is currently a bit stuck against my insane life, in which I
basically started traveling for the LinuxTag/Debcamp/Debconf combo and
still haven't finished :)

And I also need to finish the university, which involves getting a
thesis finished for the end of February, and I'm dedicating to this
mostly full-time (and I'm short of time).

However, debtags is at the moment quite stable, in the sense that the
implementation fits nicely the current state of the art of what could be
the deployment.

The only addition to debtags I'd like to do short-time would be a
function to print the list of packages installed in the system who still
haven't been fully tagged, so that the user can be pushed to contribute.

Then, what is needed it to design and realize a jump of scale, like
including debtags information in control files, officializing a tag task
force, making people adopt a tag and check that the packages who use it
do it appropriately.

It would also be nice to include tags support in more tools, except I
don't have time to produce patches myself.  The aptitude developer
complained for the lack of documentation, but did not contact me for
help as stated in the documentation.  I've offered to help, but he never
got back to me afaik.

A simple tool to do would be a set of commandline tools like debfind and
debgrep who can just output and filter a list of package names based on
a set of switches, operating on all available package informations.
They would be soo handy to use in scripts.  A debdescribe package that
added short descriptions to package names could be used to re-create
apt-cache output.

This would be nice.  It could be done extracting the filtering code of
synaptic into a higher level package query library.  It would allow
maintaining such package query library outside of synaptic, making
synaptic's Michael Vogt job easier and allowing more people to hack into
it (and possibly merging with people from grep-dctrl and similar
projects).

It would be a great idea, but I can't do it at the moment.  I'd like to
be able to graduate in march (which means asap) and then start to
dedicate myself again to these things, which I really love to do.

In the meantime, please contact me at will for any projects and ideas
you might have (and even if you (or someone else) would like to patch
debtags and stuff a bit :)

I'll do what I can, if I spot your message, to reply, discuss, suggest
and share ideas.  This is what I commit to until march, unfortunately, I
can't do much more than this. :(


Ciao,

Enrico

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GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico@debian.org>

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