Re: Misclassification of packages; "libs" and "doc" sections
On Wed, Oct 11, 2000 at 02:36:03AM +0300, Eray Ozkural <erayo@cs.bilkent.edu.tr> was heard to say:
> Daniel Burrows wrote:
> >
> > I agree. I've found any number of really important utilities by accident,
> > or by hearing someone mention them offhand.
> >
>
> Think what a new user would experience with 5000 packages and running
> dselect, console-apt or aptitude...
Could you elaborate on this? I know the current situation is confusing,
are you trying to say something more? (or are you just agreeing with me?)
> > One thing that I think is that we should have a clearly defined "default"
> > categorization system, which is a reasonable way to find a program with
>
> First, a single inheritance is-a hierarchy is not sufficient.
True. Emacs is an editor, a mail client, a news client,
a web browser, a Lisp interpreter..argh..
> I suppose the is-a hieararchy itself should have multiple inheritance.
> Which simply means that a tree doesn't work. OTOH, a tree hierarchy
> may also be useful, think TUCOWS from the viewpoint of a user
> downloading new software. Certain interfaces can represent tree views
> to the is-a graph.
Sorry, you've lost me. Could you define TUCOWS, please? (it doesn't
have anything to do with bovines, does it?)
Also, are you disagreeing with me, or just restating what I said more
succinctly? It looks like the latter..
> A part-of hierarchy is also useful. In this sense, the system may
> be partitioned into subsystems. Base may be one of these subsystems,
> X windows another. If a suitable part-of hierarchy can be attained
> this can be used to distribute release management as well (in that
> subsystem decomposition is modular)
I'm not sure I see why this would be useful except for the sake of
finding out what subsystem Debian thinks a particular package goes in.
This is usually the last thing I care about when looking for software.
> In short, I propose to take advantage of experience in OOA/OOD for
> studying software classification. Another place to look at is AI
> research on ontology and in general KR and KBs.
Hm, could you provide references for the research? I think some
cognitive science stuff could be useful as well; I should probably spend
some time next weekend reading up on it.
Daniel
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