[Debtags-devel] Updating tags on svn

[Justin B Rye]

Thaddeus H. Black wrote:
> [Topics: facet philosophy and vocabulary design.  Uninterested readers
> can safely skip this long message.  There is nothing critical here.]

I hope the uninterested readers have had the sense to killfile me...
this all gets so pedantic that at times even I feel obliged to go
for a long walk in the sunshine and think about something else.

> The line separating applications from utilities is somewhat blurry.
> Nevertheless I feel that the subjective distinction remains quite
> important and---unless you can see a more logical way to indicate
> it---should probably be retained.  (Personally as a user, I am usually
> much more interested in utilities than in applications, so at least
> users like me need to be able to draw this difference.)

I've done my best to describe where I'm drawing the line, but I
still don't know if it's in the right place to match the
expectations of Joe Random User. 

>> There are two kinds of dock-apps: 
>> a) ordinary X applications that are only called dock-apps because
>>    they're small and square and look nice arranged along the edge of
>>    your desktop - which if anything sounds like a subcategory of
>>    interface::x11.

(Where (b) = the ones with a clear dependency on a panel package)
 
> I thought that these dockapps obeyed some specific kind of WindowMaker
> software interface standard.

Maybe the windowmaker ones do, but what about, say, bubblefishymon?
(Judging from the fact that there's also a wmbubble, no.)  Following
a standard doesn't make them a "role" in the sense that content:doc
or aux:dummy is a role. 

>> And as for input-methods... they might
>> deserve to be specially handled under accessibility:: somewhere, but
>> surely they're just servers?
> 
> Well, yes, but the Chinese users need them.  To them, an input method is
> almost as basic as console-tools is to us.  Tagging input-method
> packages lets the Chinese users find them and---just as
> importantly---lets you and me filter them out.

Notice that there's no role::console-tools.  I'll agree
input-methods are important, but that just means we should make sure
they aren't stuffed in some corner where they don't really fit.

Maybe if we had some new top-level facet to unify all these
questions of unicode, output-localisation, input-methods,
accessibility and maybe even GUIness... but it's not something I'd
want to rush into.

(I'm told many local deaf people are adamant that users of British
Sign Language should be regarded as an indigenous linguistic
minority rather than as disabled.  I suppose it's lucky for us that
there's no immediate likelihood of a BSL input-method turning up and
forcing us to decide whether it's "l10n" or "a11y".) 

> Actually, Justin, I see your point.  I am not sure that you are wrong.
> After all, one should not draw a distinction between real packages in
> the real Debian archive, unless there is a real qualitative difference
> between them.  Especially, one should not use the wrong facet.  But we
> need to think about this.  One of the things we are discovering is that
> we cannot apply the facets with quite as neat, geometrical an edge as
> one might like.  We do the best we can, but...  Okay, let me ask this.
> If we reduced the vocabulary in the way you suggest, how would one tag
> the `fluxbox' binary, for example?

The fluxbox package, that is?  The tags it's got may well be my
fault ("interface::x11, role::sw:server, x11::window-manager"), and
I'm not arguing for the abolition of any of them.
-- 
JBR
Ankh kak! (Ancient Egyptian blessing)