Re: Bug#144046: general: Sections are not finely grained
Cross-posting to debian-policy.
On Mon, Apr 22, 2002 at 02:12:45PM -0400, Daniel Burrows wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 22, 2002 at 01:04:28PM -0400, Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> was heard to say:
> > It's a very fine piece of work, and it must be a hell of a
> > lot of work to keep it all updated independant of the rest of Debian.
<...>
> The problem is that we have 9500 packages, and it's really hard
> to classify all of them in a sane and consistent manner -- from the
> sheer volume if nothing else. More than that, the problem is that
> people would rather theorize about the best possible ontological
> classification on mailing lists than sit down and categorize packages.
I think the problem is that centralized solution to package
classification doesn't scale. What would scale is sharing responsibility
for package classification among package maintainers and package users.
We need three things for decent package classification, in that order:
1) mutually agreed keyword tagging scheme and tag list [1];
2) implementation of this scheme in Debian tools and infrastructure;
3) Package Classification section in the Debian Policy, providing list
of tag names with clarified meanings (for the sake of translation),
and guidelines that would allow us to file wishlist bugs against
improperly tagged packages.
I mean, sure we should work on implementation, but before we make
serious changes to the Debian infrastructure, shouldn't we agree upon
what we are trying to achieve?
(Disclamer: all of this should be done *after* Woody is released.)
[1] I prefer to use the word 'tag' as it does not associate with
full-text search or natural language processing, and thus states
more clearly that tag list should be fixed in the Debian Policy.
--
Dmitry Borodaenko
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