"Tag your packages" feedback

[Enrico Zini]

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Hello,

some time after the "Tag your packages" mail, I'm collecting all the
feedback we've got, which could be useful to add some cool items to TODO
lists (it's added things to mine already):

First thing: how did it go?  Did we have significant activity after the
announcement?  Were there interest?  Were the taggings consistent?

Then, it seems that the package list for the tag database is generated
using only i386 packages.  At least two people could not find their
package which was a non-i386 package.

I'm now going through the other feedback received:

 - I use dpkg-dev-el - how about an Emacs interface to tagging?

I don't know how to handle this one, as I don't know about dpkg-dev-el
and I'm not an Emacs user/programmer.  A power debian user tells me that
it'd make a lot of sense, though.  We'd need some emacs hacker willing
to write some (lisp) on that.

 - I tagged echoping as ipv6::enabled. But the facet ipv6 does not show
   up as a subgroup at http://debian.vitavonni.de/packagebrowser/.

Wasn't ipv6::enabled something that shouldn't be used, under the
rationale that all net apps should be ipv6 enabled and it would only
make sense to use something like ipv6::not-supported-yet?

 - How to tag packages to show that they support IDN (domain names in
   Unicode, see RFC 3490) like mutt or echoping?

Should we handle like ipv6 (that is, all apps should support IDN, so we
could only use a temporary special::idn-not-supported) or should we just
apply a tech::idn?

 - Could all the listing please be sorted alphabetically? The current
   unsorted scheme really makes this harder than necessary.
   special::not-yet-tagged-l
   special::not-yet-tagged-p
   special::not-yet-tagged-k

The not-yet-tagged make a bit of a special case here.  For non special
cases, actually showing the cardinalities near to the tag would render
explicit why the ordering is not alphabetical.

 - Connect to http://debian.vitavonni.de/packagebrowser/edit.cgi?package=<PACKAGENAME>
   Would it be possible to have a URL which shows me all packages I
   maintain, given my e-mail address? I maintain a large enough number
   of packages that going through them all individually this way would
   be quite tedious.

   There should be a better way than this one:
   for i in `grep-available -n -sPackage -FMaintainer 'Colin Watson'` ; do
     mozilla "http://debian.vitavonni.de/packagebrowser/edit.cgi?package=${i}"
   done

This is a nice feature request for future versions indeed.

 - By how much time does this system lag behind the archive?  This
   package went into sid several weeks ago.

A simple "Last sync with archive on <date>" on the pages would address
this fine, I think

 - Also, have you considered extracting tag information from xdg menu
   (.desktop) files [1] in binary packages?  This system also seems to
   have a very similar concept of categories, which could probably be
   mapped to your tagging system -- this would get a large number of
   packages (probably all KDE and GNOME apps) into your system and save
   developers significant duplicated effort.

I hadn't considered this yet, but it makes sense.  We could try a menu::
facet/namespace with the xdg menu tags inside, automatically maintained.

Autogenerated facets could be an interesting technical addition to the
system.  Also, Fabbione (fabbione@debian.org) is routinely assessing
ipv6 compatibility on packages and that could be another automatic tag
source.


Ciao,

Enrico

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

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