vocabulary structure

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Tue, Jun 27, 2006 at 09:57:39AM +0200, Peter Rockai wrote:
> There are some things bothering me about current vocabulary. One of them is
> the devel::lang: and made-of:: stuff. The made-of::<language> should probably
> go away for all turing-complete programming languages and be replaced with
> made-of::source-code. devel::lang: should be just ripped out. To specify
> language, a new facet could be created, like language:: (description
> Programming Language?).
> 
> The cases where a package contains source code in language A but is primarily
> useful with language B can be handled by tagging with both language::A and
> language::B. The idea is that if it's written in A, it can be useful for A
> coders anyway -- studying code, reusing, etc...
> 
> So the language:: facet would go like "useful for coders in a given language".

I disagree. The tagging scheme you are proposing seems to be less
informative that the current one. You indeed loose the ability of
distinguishing whether a given package is implemented in a given
language or meant to be useful for a given language.

It seems like a useful distinction to me.

The information you're trying to obtain, namely "useful for coders in a
given language", is indeed relevant, but it seems a derived information
to me. It seems to be derivable from the following two implication:

  IF  made-of::<language>     THEN  language::<language>
  IF  devel::lang:<language>  THEN  language::<language>

I really think we need support for this kind of stuff above debtags, not
directly at the tagging level.

/me mumbling about debtags-based ontologies ...

0.02 EUR from a lurker.

-- 
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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