"Semantic" shell? (for lack of better name)

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Fri, Jan 02, 2009 at 08:51:12PM -0600, Bryan Bishop wrote:
> I'd like to work on a method to search for packages based off of
> recognized input file formats and recognized output file formats of
> the contained program(s). Maybe by MIME-type (RFC 2046), such as:

I'm not really able to reconcile this paragraph about "searching
packages on a recognized format basis" with the remaining part of your
post ...

Anyhow, debtags does offer a way to search for packages on the basis
of which file format they "work with". Have a look at the
"works-with-format" facet, e.g. in the debtags tag cloud [1]. It might
be less specific than what you need, for example it does not consider
the "direction" (input vs output) of the supported format. YMMV.

[1] http://debtags.alioth.debian.org/cloud/

Cheers

PS preserving the fully quoted version of your post, to the benefit of
   debtags-devel at l.a.d.o readers

> image/gif
> image/jpeg
> image/png
> image/tiff
> video/mp4
> video/mpeg
> application/x-latex
> 
> Here's the list of MIME-type assignments:
> http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/
> 
> However, I am by no means permanently attached to MIME. It would also
> be interesting to revise the typical --help message with some
> standardized markup for formally specifying which parameters would
> prefer what type of information. Typically, when I write my quick
> scripts, I just do a few print statements and spit out some text for
> help messages, and sometimes clean it up a bit, so to replace that
> laziness I'd have to write a tool to make that less of a pain, maybe
> throw it in next to autoproject or something.
> 
> So, this might just mean an extra file in a package, with two lines,
> the first one for input recognized, the second one for types of
> output, but this of course isn't a good map for what each parameter
> will trigger in terms of output, esp. in programs that change output
> dependent on what it discovers about the input. Also, this only really
> works for single-program packages, otherwise this needs to be done at
> some other level, i.e. a file next to each binary? Is that where this
> should go??
> 
> Personally this seems kind of an obvious thing to do, but it hasn't
> happened yet, so I'm posting to ask specifically--
> 
> (1) Has this been proposed before? Can anyone give me names, links,
> addresses, or what went wrong?
> 
> (2) Anything better than MIME for these purposes?
> 
> (3) Search terms other than 'semantic shell', anyone?
> 
> (4) What should I be asking?
> 
> I've basically written up this email on a site as well-
> http://heybryan.org/shell.html

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..|  .  |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...........| ..: |.... Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
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