On Sat, Mar 15, 2003 at 11:26:40AM -0800, Osamu Aoki wrote: > > Anyway, there are (according to apt-cache stats) exactly 12585 binary > > packages TODAY. I think that you're being too optimistic if you believe > > a natural (ie, easy to navigate) categorization exists which is balanced > > enough to squeeze this into 3 levels and 25 leaves in each lowest > > screen. > No I do not. My point was current 2 levels alone to narrow down was way > too small levels for 12585 binary packages. I suggest that we do not focus on building a tree structure, but on improving navigability of the package collection, using all available means. This means we could use some funny hierarchy or dag together with a keyword filter and other different tools, with the goal to build a very good navigator widget. 12585+ packages are an interesting problem which poses non trivial usability problems and calls for some research on information visualization techniques. Talking about navigability, I strongly suggest we could start from the very well written "Effective view navigation" paper by prof. Furnas, available for download from this page: http://www.si.umich.edu/~furnas/Research.Past.html#EVN , which gives a good insight on the problem and on the caracteristics that the structure we present to the user should have. Bye, Enrico -- GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico@debian.org>
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