debtags defunct?

[Enrico Zini]

On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 01:02:48PM -0400, MK wrote:

> Into a 6500 page mediawiki based site.  The next stage of this, as
> planned by the FSF, is (hopefully) to use debtags to add pages to the
> site based on the current (debian derived) Gnusense distribution.  

Oooh! \o/ \o/ \o/
That is excellent news!

> However, as the person responsible for the work, it seems to me that
> debtags is no longer being developed/was abandoned.   I have
> examined the last CVS release and the online documentation, but have
> been having some trouble figuring out how this can be applied to suit
> our purposes -- if that is possible.

Rather than abandoned I'd call it stable: most of the recent activity
has been reviewing tag changes submitted via debtags.alioth.debian.org/edit.html
That, and more uses of tag data via apt-xapian-index: see for example
the new axi-search which allows to use tags for searching and suggests
tags to expand a search.

> Any advice or thoughts anyone has would be much appreciated -- I notice
> there is no activity on this list, so I'm also looking to see if anyone
> is available to answer specific questions as they arise.  I'm proficient
> with C/C++, perl, et al.

Ask and I'll do my best, possibly others will help as well.

So far your question is: can debtags be applied to the Free Software
Directory? I'll try to address that.

First question is: is the tag vocabulary at http://debtags.alioth.debian.org/vocabulary/
adequate for your needs? (click on a facet to see a list of its tags)

In my experience, that is of the most detailed ontologies I've ever seen
to describe free software, but whether it's adequate for you or not is,
I think, for you to judge.

If you think that it is adequate, then I understand you need to import
the data. You will find the whole review tag dataset at 
http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/debtags/tagdb/tags
and you can check it out from svn://svn.debian.org/debtags/tagdb/tags

It should be very easy to parse: read one line at a time, use /:\s+/ to
split packages from tags, and /,\s+/ to split the tag list.

That file is constantly updated, so once you import it you want to look
for updates. I can assist with that once we reach that point.

If then you allow people to edit tags in your mediawiki, it'd be
fantastic if the edits you get could be contributed back. That should be
also rather easy to arrange, again we'll talk about it if it's something
you'd like to do and when we'll get there.

Both these last two points likely can rely on the 'tagcoll' tool which
is able to compute the difference between two tag files into a sort of
patch that is easy to handle.

But let's go one step at a time. Is the vocabulary adequate for your
needs?


Ciao,

Enrico

-- 
GPG key: 4096R/E7AD5568 2009-05-08 Enrico Zini <enrico at enricozini.org>
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