Re: Debtags for defining the minimal age that a program can generally be used

2013/9/12 Andreas Tille <andreas@an3as.eu>

Your vision is fine and I definitely share it. However, I fail to see
the contradiction. The tasks can perfectly be used for classification
as well. So if you want to invent new tasks

age-0-3
age-3-6
age-6-xy
...

Okay, that makes sense :)

Is there any way to do it so that, at some point in the future we may have orthogonal classifications, like for example {0-3,3-6,6-12}x{educational,game,toy,development,office} ?

just do so. The header of such a tasks file would be

Task: Packages fit for <agegroup>
Metapackage: false
# Comment: Metapackage false prevents creation of an according metapackage
# and just creates the web sentinel pages for your view and
# design polishing
Description: Debian Jr (Kids?) packages for <agegroup>
The following packages are targeting at <agegroup> according to the
upstream authors ...

Depends: <pkg>
Remark: This <pkg> fits into <agegroup> because ...
# Comment: Remarks are printed below the package description in web sentinel

...

I'll try to do that for a initial set of data, and see how it goes. I'm a bit concern about the scalability of the design, if at some point we get to classify a big amount of packages that might fit into these categories (say, we finf 100 or 200 packages suitable for 6-9, or 9-12, or something like that).

> Of course, more tasks can be added, like packaging new things,
> spreading the word, polishing existing packages, and stuff. But what I
> would like to have is some metadata regarding at least a relevant subset of
> the packages in Debian, including relevant information about whether those
> packages are suitable for which kind of kids. That's my main goal.

The Blends concept is all about metadata. You can even access the Blends
metadata in UDD.

Cool :)

> As a side note, I would like to open a debate about this, if anyone sees it
> differently and wants to share their point of view.

I think be do perfectly agree about the goal but simply do not agree
about the tools to reach the goal. :-)

> So, to achieve that goal, I would like to have somewhere to store the
> metadata needed for this classification. DebTags has always been the most
> obvious possibility. Another option discusses was to add an extension to
> desktop files. The most quick and dirty option would be to set up an sql
> database somewhere and export everything from that. If DebTags are out of
> the equation, any suggestions about this?

As I said: The DebTags idea is fine in principle but a bit orthogonal
to the tasks design. It is a nice add on we could have. In addition to
that it has obviosly some friction from the idea to realisation. This
could be avoided and once you have your design (preferably via the
suggested tasks) you can take over this to DebTags easily.

Yup, if the debtag guys don't wanna cooperate with us, we will have to export it to our own debtags package, although that would be a less than optimal solution.

I personally would consider an additional SQL database as technical
overkill and you said yourself you want to KISS.

My thoughts, exactly.

Greetings,

Miry