On Sun, Feb 07, 2016 at 08:50:01PM +0100, Andreas Tille wrote: > If you consider my approach useful in principle I would start a > discussion on the Debian Med mailing list about the practical details. > If you have general criticism about my approach please tell me in > advance and give hints how I could increase the procedure to review the > DebTags scheme for the biological fields of Debian Med. I had a look at the diff[1]. Biology is not at all my field, and the "biology" facet is clear and bounded enough that I have no objections to pretty much any change in it. Feel free to take care of it as you wish and commit changes to it directly to master. I'm also entirely in favour of the restructuring of facet to remove the tags under biology, that I agree belong in the biology facet. I have a problem with having a new "edam" facet, and with very field-specific formats in "works-with", because I see them as very specific concepts creeping into a much more general scope, as if everyone using Debian was supposed to have an interest in biology. My problem is probably triggered by a general discomfort that I accumulated over the years by seeing the flat Debian package namespace being slowly and steadily polluted with very specific packages with very short or very general sounding names. None of these packages does anything remotely similar to what their names suggest to me: wise, velvet, treeviewx, t-coffee, raster3d, readseq, seaview, plink, muscle, melting, loki, kalign, infernal, gmap, garlic, fastlink, exonerate, bwa, bedtools, autodock, arb, alien-hunter. I do not know how to fix this at a package namespace level, and I would like to avoid the same to happen at a tag vocabulary level. I understand that, for people working all day with bioinformatics, all those things are as common and as everyday as water and air, and I don't mind if in the system that bioinformatics people use they are treated as such. In a general, universal context, however, I'd like to avoid toplevel creep of field-specific concepts, and try to design things so that concepts from all of the fields where Debian can possibly be used[3] can possibly coexist, and not compete on who's the first to allocate a three letter acronym on a flat namespace. How about biology-edam facet, and a biology-format facet? We could also decide that each tag under "field" can act as a prefix for any number of field-specific facets, maintained by the people who package field-specific packages. What do you think? [1] http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debtags/vocabulary.git/diff/?id=edam&id2=master [3] say, for example, Arts, Astronomy, Aviation, Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Electronics, Financial, Genealogy, Geography, Geology, Linguistics, Mathematics, Medicine, Meteorology, Physics, Religion, Statistics, and more. Enrico -- GPG key: 4096R/E7AD5568 2009-05-08 Enrico Zini <enrico@enricozini.org>
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