debian package browser

[Hervé Eychenne]

On Thu, Jan 29, 2004 at 03:18:21PM +0100, Erich Schubert wrote:

> Hervé Eychenne wrote:

> > http://debian.vitavonni.de/packagebrowser/?tags=daemon%2Cnetcomm%2Csecurity
> > why don't we have "Intrusion Detection System" shown in "Automatic
> > Subgroups", for example?

> Because there are too few matches.
> The package browser applies a set of rules to form subgroups.
> We have two goals:
> - provide a hierarchy allowing you to narrow down your search quickly
> - provide a hierarchy which isn't too broad
> If we would build all possible subgroups you would end up with way too
> many of them.

There might be quite a few... but if you sort them by cardinal (or
alphabetic order, you could leave the choice) it might be very
useful though. At least it would be interesting to have
the possibility of displaying all of them, even if a minimal subset
(based on your heuristics) is displayed by default.

> Think of the subgroups as Yes-No questions, with the goal
> that you must say Yes and No about equally often (with the next
> questions being recalculated after each Yes)

> On the given web page, the subgroup "Authentication" contains 11
> packages or so. That brought the remaining packages count down to 9,
> which is okay for displaying directly on the webpage without forming
> additional groups. If there were like 5 more packages fitting into
> "IDS" a new automatic subgroup would appear.

Ok, I see.
So the goal is to have approximately the same number of packages in
subgroups as the number of "flat" packages displayed.

I think the result is not always the best strategy. Suppose you know
exactly what kind of functionnality you're looking for (and that's
most of the interest of this interface)... then you're often forced to
wander through the "flat" list of packages, and sort out many packages
which don't correspond to what you're looking for.

What I mean is that the search strategy is not very uniform.
Sometimes you have a matching category in the list of subgroups,
sometimes not, and in almost any case you have to look at the "flat" list,
which is not very efficient (as there are many packages which don't
fit exactly to what you're looking for).
And the fact that the subgroups you're still looking for to refine
your search are sometimes displayed (sometimes not, even if you know
they exist) is confusing, as you have no way to know in advance if
it will be displayed or not.

I think that my search would more efficient with a constant strategy.
Anyway, one can provide both in the future, like I said.

> > Another thing: why don't you provide a way to search for a package
> > name directly (in the start page)?

> Because it's just a quick perl hack right now. ;-)
> The package browser needs to be rewritten properly. ;-)

Ok.

 Hervé

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