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

[Benjamin Mesing]

Hello,

> 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)
I think we have to take care not to blow up the tagging approach too
much. As it is meant to makes finding packages easier for the user, it
should not make the process of searching too complicated. We could end
up requesting the user learning so much new things and making so much
choices that he gives up at last and falls back to simple text search. I
think for cases as described above a combination of different types of
searches might be a better solution. The search application I've
developed (http://packagesearch.sourceforge.net) provides a single
interface for different types of search. If I search I often use the
text search because there I do not have to search for the correct tag to
select even now. I think this won't become easier if we add more
features. Btw. this is one reason why I do not like the vocabulary to
become too crowded.
But I might be wrong here and would be glad to be proven so - so
researching on this topic would definetely bring some benifit. Just make
sure to test acceptance from the users too.


I'd also like to make a request:
I would really like my search program to become part of the official
Debian distribution, but I would need someone to do this. I already
create debian packages so it should not be to much effort. What needs to
be done is some policy checking by an experienced maintainer and of
course the actual uploading. In the long term I would love to become a
debian maintainer on my own but I need to earn some trust first :-) So
if anyone would be willing to do this job please tell me.

Thanks for you attention,

Greetings Ben