Debtags and Debram (Was: Re: New debtags suite just uploaded)

[Hervé Eychenne]

On Sat, Jul 03, 2004 at 01:26:18AM +0200, Enrico Zini wrote:

> > surreal.  It is also too big for me to handle
> > alone.  I am pleased and relieved to lace up my
> > boots and join your army.

> World domination!!

Yes, but this is even more than that. :-)
For the moment, the tagging effort will be coming from Debian people.
But in the end, it should be handled at a higher level, probably
through a much enhanced Free Software Directory.
Every upstream maintainer should be responsible for the tags
associated with his application (maybe completed by Debian for
its packages if necessary). Anonymous changes would also be welcomed,
of course.

> As our faceted orizons expand, I can see lots of new facets popping up
> and opening the new problem of having too many facets to keep track of,
> making interfaces insane again.  This is already starting to happen.

Having many facets doesn't appear as a real problem to me.
If things are complex, then the model should express this complexity.
The interface is another problem: it should provide a simple view for
people that want it.

> One idea would be to introduce a new level in the facet selection tree
> to organize the facets themselves; another idea would be to first ask
> the user what facets are relevant to him/her and then hide the others.

Another would be to enable simple wandering through the facets (search
by typing characters), and sort facets from most used to less
frequently used.

> Another debtags problem is size: the whole suite has 2 libraries, 2
> commandline tools and 2 GUI interfaces,

This is what is needed. :-) And maybe more in the future...

> and all of this is becoming
> rather difficult to maintain and package, let alone to improve.  I'm
> hoping that with time and further spreading of the system, hacking on
> the code will become a community job and that subversion will see
> commits by other people as well.  I'm also quite worried because I
> haven't managed to obtain this with guessnet and the other simpler
> packages I maintain, and I fear that it may be a problem on how I handl=
e
> my coding projects;

Oh... no, believe me.
History is full of visionary men that had to struggle alone before
their work eventually came to light.
And more generally, the fact that people do not contribute directly
to a project does not mean that noone finds it interesting.
Vision, skills, motivation, and time are scarce resources... :-(

 Hervé

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(°=  Hervé Eychenne
//)  Homepage:          http://www.eychenne.org/
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