[Debtags-devel] Re: Recent progress

[Benjamin Mesing]

> > That allows to keep the complexity of the vocabulary low.
> 
> Yes, but you don't really justify why it should be so.
> I don't care about the complexity of backends. Backends can/must be as
> powerful, complex, and expressive as possible. Only the user
> interfaces may require some simplicity.
Ok, of course you are right. I guess I'm a coward - I don't want to do
this :-) Perhaps I am so stuck in my ways that I fail to think of easier
approaches to make a simple UI. You made some suggestion which sound
promising. Though I think its not an easy task to hide the complexity of
the system from the user. (Damn, some ideas that come to my mind here,
crosscut my nice clean plugin structure :-(


> > Searching a package can be split into two steps, first searching the
> > correct tags and second searching the packages in the result.
> 
> Yes, but while it may be desirable to show the two steps explicitely,
> they can be transparently combined.
And how would you do that??


> > So in the end it comes down to what we consider to be more important -
> > exact search results or a vocabulary with a low complexity reducing the
> > complexity of the first step and the tagging process.
> 
> > You vote for the first, me for the latter and I don't know who is
> > right :-(
> 
> :-)
> I think things must be as complex as they can be for people who can
> afford dealing with power (backend), and as simple as possible for people
> who don't care (UI). That's the UNIX philosophy, isn't it?
Ok, you're right again. You were able to resolve my doubts regarding the
end user. 
However there is the issue of tagging. The more complex the database,
the more likely it will be that maintainers do not tag their packages
correctly. I know you will say that this is a UI issue :-) But I think
we have to live with the fact that very different UIs will be around
(web, GUI Application, console tools,...) and some will not do a very
good job. So the data might be bad - which makes the whole system look
bad. -- But when thinking about it (sorry for thinking out loud :-) this
might be solved by the community - like Brian suggested with a wiki
approach or with the simple mechanism of reportbug.
So finally there is not much I can say against a complex vocabulary any
more... But please don't let it become to frayed :-))

Greetings Ben