Reclassification of packages

[Thomas Hood <thood@excite.com>]

(Subject was "Misclassification of packages ..."

> I'd like to show [at least] two major problems to be solved:
>   * a package may fall in more than one category
>   * there may be a hierarchy of categories

There are two reasons a package may fall into more than
one class.  The first is that there are different 
ways of classifying: one may classify by function, theme,
file type, code level, importance, age, etc.  The current
"sections" of the Debian archive are a mishmash of classes
defined in these different ways.  Thus a document describing
a sound library might be in "doc", "libs" or "sound".

The second reason a package may fall into more than one
class is that under most classification schemes a package
can fit more than one description.  An editor can also be
a text processor, etc.

The appropriate way to deal with this issue is to classify
each package in all the different ways that are of interest
to users.  Thus instead of "Section:" we might have (e.g.):

Importance: basic|non-basic
Type: meta|documentation|code
Code-level: not-applicable|kernel|lib|daemon|exec
Code-user-interface: not-applicable|line|terminal|X
Primary-related-function: kernel|
         audio-support|video-support|disk-support|hardware-support|
         interpreters-and-shells|other-os-fs|old-libraries|encryption|
         printing|X|emacs|
         administration|development|
         telecommunication|networking|mail|news|www|
         text-processing|TeX|graphics|sound|electronics|ham-radio|mathematics|
         business|hobbies|family|
         games|
         misc
Secondary-related-functions: (a list of keywords from the above list)

Thomas Hood