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

Stefano Zacchiroli zack@debian.org
Sun, 26 Sep 2004 09:00:25 +0200


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On Sun, Sep 26, 2004 at 12:49:13AM +0200, Enrico Zini wrote:
> >   * Discuss the idea of "Adopting" tags, that is having people who
> >   take care of the correctness of the list of packages associated to
> >   a given tag (which another point of view compared to checking that
> >   all tags associated to a package are correct) (Suggested by Erich
> >   Schubert)
> This would be a really effective idea for having quality assurance.
> Another powerful way to quality assurance is having package managers
> which use tags, so that inconsistencies can be spotted and signaled in
> everyday life.
> >   * Discuss the idea of "Outsourcing" the maintenance of some tags:
> >   for example the Gnome and KDE people could take care of
> >   maintaining the tag data related to Gnome and KDE.
> Here the idea of facets helps, as different groups could take care of
> facets related to areas they know better.  For example, the Agnula
> people have volunteered to maintain the "sound" facet.

In debian we have several sub-communities related to various efforts of
the project. The first ones that comes in to my mind are those involved
in maintaining packages related to a given programming language. Just
looking at the debian maling lists list reveals perl, python, ocaml
communities and many more.

It would be a good idea to "assign" (of course someone needs to
volunteer, but ok ... you get the idea) the maintanance of communities
related tags to the communities themselves.

I volunteer to maintain to maintain the tags related to the ocaml
programming language. (BTW, I already tried twice in the past to mail
the debian-usability project on the subject but I was unable to get my
mail trhu, where those discussion needs now to be carried on?
debtags-devel?)

> >   * Inclusion of "Tag:" fields in package
> >     control files
> Here I'm unsure if it should be done, as the tag data is updated more
> often than the package data, as new facets show up, or some are
> reorganized.  However, having something like that means reminding debian
> developers to tag their new packages, which would be very important: as
> you say, if 100 new packages per weeks hit the archive, just tagging
> those is a pretty tough job, and it would be extremely handy to have
> developers at least provide a first, possibly imperfect categorization.

I agree with Enrico here. debtags is a successfull effort in my opinion
exactly because it was set up independently from our central package
database. This permits to "risks" a bit more and doesn't necessarly need
involvement by the people in care of maintaining our core tools which
could be busy in some higher priority goal.

Cheers.

--=20
Stefano Zacchiroli -*- Computer Science PhD student @ Uny Bologna, Italy
zack@{cs.unibo.it,debian.org,bononia.it} -%- http://www.bononia.it/zack/
If there's any real truth it's that the entire multidimensional infinity
of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs. -!-

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