On 10/19/19 7:59 PM, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
On Saturday 2019-10-19 00:28, Simon Lees wrote:
A big part of my proposal is to only provide group info for things that make sense to be found with group info
Ah but that the pedantic reader might think "how do you determine what does and what does not make sense to be searched", that inherently is asking for an opinion again.
Well I think there will always be a grey area, there are some things where its obviously useful others where they are clearly not useful and then there is the bit in between. Generally in openSUSE for other such "grey area's" we leave it up to the maintainers discretion.
which means libraries and other core dependencies that people will have installed anyway shouldn't really have groups because it will just add "noise"
I would like to come back to that. In an earlier posting, if I remember it right, you pointed to certain packages being special/specific enough that one would only target them by name, something like libblah-devel, hence it would not need a classification.
But the universes of texlive, CPAN, Haskell, and other "repackagings" in openSUSE is quite large, and if I am not well versed in the use of said programming language, I might start going for an unspecific search there. Looking for something to spruce up PDF presentations? Well texlive-beamer might be that if it had that presentation tag. Need a HTTP client in Perl, and don't like LWP? Try tags perl http - if the packages had them.
Well as a developer this perl example doesn't really hold for me. If I am looking for something like that then the things I care about are the API, documentation etc and I won't be able to tell that from Yast so i'd be starting my search from google instead.
A tool using tags could simply read existing Groups: values as separate tags. Of course, additional tags may be added - e.g. with a ' ' separator - like "Base System scripting". (Or continue using '/' as tag separator. Sounds pretty simple and straightforward.
It does sound simple until you look at the fact that what we have for current groups is a bit of a mess. [...] What we have currently doesn't provide a good starting point as such if we do something it would at this point be better to start from scratch.
But just a "bit of a mess". Iff groups were a veritable mess and not good enough a "starting point", then something like PackageHub would not have worked with the RPM Group: field as it did, would it; instead it would have had to use the disconnected yast-Package-Group dataset or something.
Package hub has a more limited set of packages then openSUSE which likely makes it less of an issue.
For some things in the past we have had groups that are two fine grain, so you might find one piece of software in one group, but another similar piece of software that you'd expect to be in the same group in a different group.
That's an issue of the single-valuedness, not so much the selectable topic names.
Yes but given the single-valuedness of the old system it makes using it as a starting point more of an issue. Although most packages using desktop files are single valued yet don't have these issues. -- Simon Lees (Simotek) http://simotek.net Emergency Update Team keybase.io/simotek SUSE Linux Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30 GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B