New tags for biology and medicine.

Andreas Tille tillea at rki.de
Tue Sep 4 12:43:41 UTC 2007


On Tue, 4 Sep 2007, Steffen Moeller wrote:

> * When thinking about automated installations of software (i.e. in grid
> computing) we need a language that allows us to talk about what is eligible
> for installations and what is not. Debtags are not perfect and other efforts
> describing various kinds of properties that software can have, there is
> nothing as sweet as Debtags to talk about what the software is actually
> doing.

Well, I'm convinced that DebTags might be a very great tools for different
things, but I doubt that it is the best idea to base installations of
clusters on DebTags technology.  You certainly want to know _exactly_
what is installed on your cluster and do not really want it to be changed
by any change in the DebTags database.  I think for this purpose the
meta package approach is the better way to go.

> * Debian integrates communities. This is my way to read Custom Debian
> Distributions that are basically saying they people flock together to extend
> Debian towards a particular direction. Specialisation of Debian comes with a
> specialisation of terms. It is natural.

Sure.  But I think subsetting makes sense in case your main set is
to large to be managed with the means you have at hand.  IMHO this
is actually not (yet) the case.  We want to extend Debian but I don't
think that we should try to make a science out of classifying and
subsetting what finally might end up on a real live installation
all together again.

> I like the above sketched suggestion to allow for disjunct sets of facets that
> are maintained by different communities. It would seem natural to me to
> eventually allow for sub-facets of some kind with a higher number of ":" in
> their IDs to thus allow for an easier reduction of complexity. Though ...
> well ... it may not be needed tomorrow.

I think we could wait with our fine grained subsets until this is
implemented.  Once this is done also the number of packages that
rectifies a more fine grained subsetting will have increased. :)

Kind regards

       Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de



More information about the Debtags-devel mailing list