Crossing debtags and popcon

[Enrico Zini]

On Sun, Feb 04, 2007 at 11:56:52AM +0100, Andrea Bolognani wrote:

> > In principle these are objectives we should be working towards, but
> > pardon me if I don't hold my breath waiting for them to be realised.
> I didn't say it would be easy or quick.

If it's not easy and quick I'm not spending time on it, because before
I would have finished building it, the nature of the problem I'm trying
to solve will already have changed.


> The problems in getting the Package file in sync will disappear as soon as
> we get dpkg to support tags; the problem of having wrong tags in the Package
> file is a different, harder to fix, one.

dpkg will never support tags, and has no reason to support tags: dpkg
only needs to install and deinstall packages, and tags are not involved.


> > > Or to file a bug against the package having wrong tags.
> > That _is_ filing a bug.  Wishlist bugs without a patch are much more
> > likely to be ignored.
> I was talking about wishlist bugs with a patch, of course.

It's not my intention to start flooding the BTS with bugs about tags:
that'll mean bug mass filing in case of reorganisations, bugs not
getting fixed because it's minor and the maintainer doesn't care,
arguing with the maintainer if the bug is really a bug...  Sections for
example have overrides in the ftp-master side and you won't see a bug
saying that a package has the wrong section.  Bugs are like that, but
even more like that, as the tag database gets reorganised from time to
time.

The experiment I ran with tags in the packages file has left me with
mixed feelings about continuing that or not.  Some maintainers did it
definitely wrongly, and I haven't bothered filed bugs, but just wrote a
tiny script that fixes their tags before merging with the other tag
data.

Now I'm asking myself if I shouldn't just discontinue tags in control
files, especially since the web interface now is good both for
maintainers and for me when reviewing.

Tags in control files can be used to have versioned tags for the
packages; however, for that to work we have to assume that maintainers
will put the right tags in the control file, and I've decided to design
the system with the assumption that this will never happen.


> I'm still convinced that this is a temporary situation. Of course we are not
> ready to work the way I'd want to *right now*. We still have a lot of
> untagged packages, the vocabulary is still subject to big modifications.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_laws_of_library_science

These laws work just as well if you substitute books->packages and
reader->user.

In particular, the 5th: "The library is a growing organism." guarantees
us that the vocabulary will *always* be subject to small or big
modifications.


Ciao,

Enrico

-- 
GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico at debian.org>
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