Feature changed by: John Pemberton (toes) Feature #316780, revision 2 Title: Search for application by description Buildservice: Unconfirmed Priority Requester: Desirable openSUSE Distribution: Unconfirmed Priority Requester: Desirable Requested by: Philipp Bielefeldt (pbiel) Partner organization: openSUSE.org Description: Installing programs on openSuSE already offers the best experience in the Linux world. Yet, finding applications you need can be a little too complicated, as you'll usually have to know what program you're looking for. I'll give an example: On my new openSuSE machine, I intended to install a twitter client, so I went to software.opensuse.org and typed "twitter client". It found 0 results. The Software Manager came up with turpial at least (because it contains "Twitter Client" in it's description). Nevertheless, Gwibber, Hotot, Tweetdeck, Choqok and many others are available for openSuSE. It would help if a search for a specific use case could give me all information necessary to find a well-suited program for my needs. + Discussion: + #1: John Pemberton (toes) (2013-12-09 00:20:36) + When developing Software, I'd normally think of a "use case" as + something more detailed than "Twitter Client". + Although, sometimes I've wanted a better way to get a list of + applications which exist for a specific purpose, and which are + available for download from openSUSE repositories. + If that's the sort of thing that is meant by " use case " here, then in + a very general sense, it sounds like the suggested feature is + potentially useful. + It's when I start thinking about how the proposed feature might be + implemented, that I have concerns. Would it be implemented by tagging + RPM's in some way? + When I consider using an application, especially one on which I would + rely for a purpose that's important to me, I tend to search the + Internet to try to get some idea of the quality of the program. But + what word or term should I use to search for potential problems with + the program, "problem", "issue", "bug", "gotch'a" ? + I've often wished that Search Engines could have detailed analyzers for + Human Language, that would determine the exact context in which a word + or phrase is used, and for a given context, the Search Engine's index + would be normalized on a single word or term, and a thesaurus facility + would match synonymous terms. That concept becomes more involved when + you include different Human languages with different euphemisms + It would seem that the same sort of issues would apply to tagging RPM's + WRT the proposed feature. Even more involvement would be added if you + wanted to distinguish between different sets of features. E.G., + different sets of features in "Twitter Client"'s. + FYI, when I check all the "Search in" options in YAST and search for + "twitter", the search returns all the clients you've mentioned, expect + Tweetdeck, but also returns Twitux and others. + Checking all the options is an approach I often follow. If I get way + too many results, I'll un-check some options, do another search, or + just do an Internet search for the purpose I'm trying to satisfy to get + the names of Applications that match, then feed the Applications names + to YAST. + If implementing the proposed feature would require associating a tag, + or perhaps multiple tags, with each RPM, how much additional effort + would that add to the release procedure? Especially for RPM's that + serve multiple, or many, purposes. + Perhaps someone who knows the release procedure very well could comment + on what might be involved. -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/316780