Making some tags mandatory

[Andreas Tille]

On Fri, 27 Feb 2009, Enrico Zini wrote:

> The way I see it, the last thread on sections has opened a bit of a can
> of worms: now first everyone will want a section for their favourite
> topic, then there is going to be a fight on which one to pick in case
> packages that could belong to more than one section.  Been there, done
> that :)

If you just open this can of worms which is basically about categorizing
Debian packages I might throw the method which was invented by Debian Pure
Blends effort into it as well.  The rationale behind this is that my plan
is to find a closer connection between tasks and debtags.  For those who
have no idea about those tasks you might like to have a look for example
at the tasks page of Debian Science[1].

The reason why I rise this issue here is that the following discussion
quite regularly pops up:  Does package x belong to category A or B.  This
question is an issue for the section we put some packages into - it is not
for DebTags (if I understand debtags correctly this was one of the main
reasons to invent it) and it is also not true for tasks because package
x can be useful in more than one task and so it can be added to the according
task file.  For instance the question whether the package octave is
a package in the field of mathematics or physics or numericalcomputation
just makes no sense.  The question is rather: Does a mathematician need
octave? Does a physicis need octave? etc.

So I would like to bring back the issue of categorisation from a
sophisticated scientific discussion about the "right" category for
a package to the user oriented view:  I want to solve a certain task -
just install all packages which might be useful for this task and
please do not force me to understand your complex categorisation
scheme (how well thought it might be).

There are just different points of view: From a distributors point
of view it makes sense to put packages into different sections to
give some structure to the archive.