Annoyances of aptitude (Was: Where are we now?) (Was: Bits from the RM)

[Erich Schubert]

Daniel Burrows wrote:
> (e) I've heard about a "debtags" database system that's trying to
>     find a general solution to the problem of categorizing packages.
>     I took a look at their library at one point and wasn't able to
>     figure out how to use it, but if this project is still going
>     somewhere, supporting it in aptitude would be nice.

You can try out debtags either via the web interface at
http://debian.vitavonni.de/packagebrowser/
or by installing the "synaptic-debtags" package, which has a debtags
view.
(In "views", select "tag view")

Thanks to mvo and enrico for doing this synaptic integration at debconf.
Of course there is still room for improvement, but this is the slickest
interface i know. ;-)
This to improve in synaptic-debtags:
- make the tree less deep, don't make subfolders if only < 10 packages
are left etc.
- show tag descriptions.
- handle "virtual" tags in the tree, such as "ui", which basically is a
union of "ui::gtk", "ui::qt", "ui::ncurses" etc. (virtual tags: tags
where all packages are in a subgroup)

Things to improve with debtags in general:
- more tagging. Too many packages are still untagged
- inconsistent tagging. New tags were added, so many tagged packages are
incompletely tagged. For example many applications don't have a user
interface specified.
- inconsistent tags. some features have tags, others don't.
- structure is becoming to deep IMHO. but if you want to keep the
number-of-results low you need such a deep structure.

Gruss,
Erich Schubert
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