[Debtags-devel] Re: Do we need better documentation about our subsections?

[Erich Schubert]

Hi,

No, i don't think debtags will replace the "sections" anytime soon.

First of all, sections *do* have a meaning for package management:
"base" packages play a special role IIRC.
Also they do provide a complete disjoint separation of packages, which
debtags cannot provide.
For backwards compatibility and upgrade paths, sections will have to
stay for at least 2 releases after debtags have been made preferred
and sections obsolete. So sections will be around for at least the
next 5 years.

Debtags essentially is good for finding packages you do *not* know. It
is not suited for trying to browse all packages (okay, this is pretty
insane already with 10k+ packages...)

This is a discussion we really can postpone until we have a
well-working and widely adopted system. I.e. getting all packages
reasonably tagged is top priority, getting this information into
debian and having it maintained by the package maintainers is next.
After that we can talk about dropping things like sections.

(I assume that the reworking of the vocabulary is mostly done by now.
Maybe we'll need some "add tag incompletely-tagged to package *" runs
still until we have all tags we need, but at least i think we've
settled down to a consistent namespacing in the vocabulary now with
pretty much disjoint facets and tags.

Greetings,
Erich Schubert
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