Re: Misclassification of packages; "libs" and "doc" sections

["Keith G. Murphy" <keithmur@mindspring.com>]

Daniel Burrows wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Oct 10, 2000 at 05:18:55PM +0900, Junichi Uekawa <dancer@netfort.gr.jp> was heard to say:
> > Trying to make hierarchies will probably fail, because we don't seem to be
> > able to agree on a set hierarchy.
> 
>   This has been suggested before.  I would like to claim something else:
> if we DON'T have some default hierarchy, attempting to implement a scheme like
> this is almost guaranteed to fail in its goal of making it easier to find
> packages.  In fact, it is almost certain to make it more confusing, simply
> because of the huge number of variables involved.  I've tried to navigate
> bug-tracking systems and search engines that only provide an amorphous set
> of "keywords", and I've never been able to use them effectively compared
> to ones that use arbitrary and imperfect hierarchical organizations.
> 
>   Note that I'm not *opposed* to keywords, we could even use them
> to generate any and all displayed hierarchies; I just think that we really
> need a reasonable default hierarchy that the packages fall into (which might
> not even include all possible keywords).
> 
IANADD (which doesn't disqualify me from an opinion about this), but I
agree.  Some of the existing categories are quite useful.  Browsing
through the 'mail' category, for instance, or the 'web software'
category, often turns up useful things for me.  I suspect that having a
primary category like this will always be useful for those times you
want to see only things that have 'mail', for instance, as their primary
function; i.e., you don't want to see everybody-and-his-dog that have a
mail interface.

A keyword search, if implemented, also should have at least a short
description like the current web page lists of packages.

Thanks, as always, for this wonderful thing called Debian.