Please support experimental in the web tagger

[Benjamin Mesing]

On Sat, 2006-12-02 at 22:23 +0000, Enrico Zini wrote:
> At the beginning I was of the idea that if a
> maintainer wants to take control of the tag they can do it, and if
> they get some tag wrong we can handle it through bug reports.
> 
> Now I wonder if it isn't more trouble than it's worth.
> 
> The parallel with section/priority unfortunately stands only up to some
> point: there's much more information to be maintained with tags, and
> it's very hard to concentrate in a single person or small group both the
> manpower and the know-how to maintain the information well.

So you are saying, that to do a good tagging you need to be pretty
familiar with the vocabulary. 
I think we should do everything in our power to counteract that
requirement! I have one main reason: if the vocabulary is so
complicated, that the average maintainer won't get the tagging right, it
is highly likely, that the average person won't be able to understand
the vocabulary to perform a good search. 

I believe, that the current "suggested tags" feature in the web-editor
(and the editor as a whole that is), brings us a big step into enabling
tagging for everyone. 

I do not believe, that the current vocabulary is not understandable for
an average user - assuming a good guidance.


> The model that seems to have most potential for most tags is to have
> people adopt tags or facets, and ensure that the right packages are
> properly tagged with the tags they adopted.

I believe the "let the maintainer do it"-approach is better in the long
run. Packaging a new piece of software is already a job that usually
takes several hours. Spending 5 minutes to do a decent tagging does not
sound like it is to much of an effort. That assumes that there is a good
tagging tool, which supports selecting tags for new packages.
That being said, I am aware, that this would be a long term goal since
we need to convince every package maintainer that tagging is an
important facet of the packaging process.

Regards Ben