[Debtags-devel] Ideas that came out of an Aglianico bottle last night

[Erich Schubert]

Hi,
Time draws closer for when i depart to berkeley to work on Debtags.

Enrico, maybe we should try to get back to the old concept of
providing "exhaustive, but not too much choice". ;-)
I wouldn't try to limit the facets shown at the beginning. One time or
the other you want to start differently.

For the web frontend, my current idea is to show alternating a list of
facets together with a count of how many packages are tagged and maybe
the selectivity; then only show contents of that facet to the user,
maybe sorted by selectivity again.

OTOH, I'm not yet 100% sure about the tagging thing. IMHO, recent work
on tags has shown more complex demands.

For example file type handlings. I love the idea of having tags for
file format support. That can show so damn useful.

But sooner or later we are going to need to differentiate between "can
play mp3" and "can create mp3". using the role tags won't do: for
example a program may be able to playback mp3 and ogg-vorbis, but only
create ogg-vorbis.
So I fear we are going to need some kind of predicates, which means
making progress towards "reasoning".
Tags would then look like action::playback(file-format::mp3
file-format::vorbis), action::create(file-format::vorbis)

But i'm a bit biased here, since there is a lot of
reasoning-on-the-web work being done at my institute (and in the
rewerse project) and i'm considering this area for my diploma thesis.
So what do you think?

Greetings,
Erich Schubert
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