debtags defunct?

[MK]

Sorry for the delay, this has actually been pushed back a bit -- but it
will still get done, hopefully in the next month or so.

On Thu, 19 Aug 2010 11:48:32 +0100
Enrico Zini <enrico at enricozini.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 12:41:42PM -0400, MK wrote:
> > criteria I think most easily/appropriately garnered from debtag's
> > facet::tag structure.  Most of the other data is already available
> > via apt-cache, so I'd like to use debtags to round out the
> > information; this way we can add stuff from debian databases
> > without having to leave some of the wiki criteria blank.
> 
> Ok. The only thing I didn't get is what you mean with "leave some of
> the wiki criteria blank".

Just that the structure that's there now was lifted directly from the
old directories database -- and once upon a time that was taken from an
even older web directory database; I think the 6000+ projects that are
there now were in fact entered one at a time.  And, of course, this was
done totally independently of debian catalouging, so I was not sure how
the two sets of data would match up, but I think they will.

> At some point I'll want to blog about your efforts so it also ends up
> in the news in the debtags homepage.

Okay, I will keep you informed then!

> > Which leads to my first real question(s):  I ran "debtags update"
> > and then tried "debtags show debtags" (or "debtags show vim", et.
> > al.), but contra the manpage, this just gives exactly the same
> > thing as "apt-cache show" -- there is no facet::tag data.
> 
> Yes. In the past, apt-cache show wouldn't show tags, and debtags show
> would; now apt-cache has caught up with debtags in that respect :)

Alright -- it is just not immediately obvious to me what information
there is part of debtags, there is nothing presented in the form of
the facet::tag.  So while there are a bunch of tags to be found this
way:

debtags cat | grep gimp

I would say *none* of those tags appear with:

debtags show gimp

> You're probably better off skipping debtags altogether and just
> getting the raw, reviewed dataset with:
> 
>   svn cat svn://svn.debian.org/debtags/tagdb/tags

Will do!  I know the one caveat the FSF wants to impose is than no
"non-free" stuff end up on the site, which is why they wanted to use
gnusense as a filter.

> There are a few quirks interface-wise (UI tags are shown in
> Prerequisites, in Find the lists only show 2 or 3 lines making it hard
> to read the options) but I assume those are because the website is not
> finished yet.

Thanks for these points.  What's actually temporarily suspended doing
more pages from debtags for the moment is that we need some other forms
for the maintainers to use for manually adding new pages without having
to mess with the semantic mediawiki markup, which is a little hairier
than yer average wikipedia article (mostly because of the searchable
semantic properties).  I would like to incorporate that, and
those forms you saw (notice they were not really wiki pages), directly
into the wiki proper as a plug-in, which requires hacking some of the
php (which I'm new to) source, etc, but probably a worthwhile effort.

> You may want to have a look at the works-with:: tags, which I find to
> be quite useful user-wise. 

A quick glance leads me to suspect these have a similar hierarchy to
the old directory's "Software Categories" (they are not in a hierarchy
anymore as that is not so compatible with Semantic), eg, gimp might be
in "raster graphics" a subcategory of "image related" (actually it's
not, but it could have been, and the works-with tags are like that).

> Have you seen the goplay/goadmin/golearn/... packages? They make use
> of tags (facets like game::, admin::, biology::, devel::, office::,
> security::, sound::, web::) to provide task-specific package search
> interfaces. The result is really rather nice.

Will check that out too, might have some more questions ;)

> These are the first things that come off the top of my mind. Please
> let me know if they are useful or if you were looking for something
> else.

You've been totally helpful sir, much thanks -- you'll hear from me
again in (hopefully) a few weeks when I can get going on this in
earnest.

-- 
MK <halfcountplus at intergate.com>