Tag reorganization proposal: works-with::*, filetransfer::*, protocol::*

Tyln Sylverwind tsylverwind at gmail.com
Fri Aug 4 09:05:19 UTC 2006


On further thought, UTF-8 could be recognized as a protocol.  It does
identify a standard for various forms of data transfer (file, input,
network). Perhaps something along the lines of "protocol::encoding-utf-8".
However, according to the tagging guidelines everything should
theoretically support Unicode.

> works-with::text:unicode
> 
> Please do not tag programs with simple unicode support, doing so would
> make this tag useless, but only if the editor has special support for
> it, like code tables etc.
> 
> Ultimately, all applications should have unicode support. 

Perhaps then, only packages that either add Unicode support to an
application or are otherwise built specifically to address Unicode should
be tagged with a "works-with::unicode"?

Note that the "text" part of that tag is excessively abstract.  A tool
that addresses support for displaying UTF-8 encoded names from MP3 tags
isn't going to occur to somebody as a "works-with::text".  a solid,
present example of such is the utf8-migration-tool package which is a tool
for migrating a system to the UTF-8 locale.  Though we generally think of
Unicode as a "text encoding", Unicode effects much more than what users
would commonly refer to as "text".

This topic also has me thinking about another similar fundamental change,
IPv6.  Sure, everything is going to eventually support IPv6, but support
is currently very limited.  Do we currently identify all IPv6-supporting
packages by labeling them with "protocol::ipv6" and eventually phase out
the tags when ipv6-support becomes mainstream?

Also, what about the non-Unicode supporting packages.  How would I go
about identifying that I don't want to browse packages known not to work
with Unicode?  How will I go about identifying that I don't want to browse
packages known not to work with IPv6 when it achieves the same state?

Regards,

Tyln Sylverwind




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