Keywords (Was: Gnutrion)
Sorry Nick for my ignorance of netiquette and quoting your private mail
in a public forum. But I hope that you have no problems with it because
your ideas are worth discussing in public.
On 25 Sep 2002, Nick Hockings - FreeNET Africa wrote:
> "Nutrition" apps would seem to be a good case for multiple group
> membership.
ACK.
> A nutrition app may be of use (depending on genral design and specfic
> installations) to many different groups of users from
> Biomedical/zoological research to clinical diagnostics & treatment to
> public health education.
>
> Any individual app should appear in each list that it qualified for. (Not
> every nutrion app would be of such ide use, but one might evolve that way
> sometime.) We must also consider that both deb-med and the packages it
> contains are growing & evolving entities. There may be no one right way to
> classify applications.
For sure. The classification is kind of a hammer and if the only tool you
are owning is a hammer the whole world looks like a nail. I would love to
see a more flexible approach here but it is currently the only technical way
I could see to manage the stuff.
> Would it be practical to have a field in the package description for
> keywords wrt likely uses?
Currently Debian policy does not contain such a field. There were
discussions in the debian-devel mailing list archive about this. The
main reason is that it is really hard to find a restricted set of keywords
in general for all Debian packages.
On the other hand in Debian-Med we have not this wide variety of keywords
which would be necessary for general Debian and we could perhaps do something
in this field. Two possible solutions come into my mind:
1. Debian policy "C.2.2.1. User-defined fields"
We could insert a field in debian/control
XBCS-KEYWORD:
which could be parsed by some tool (which has to be written.
2. Agree to put a line into the long description of a package
which contains the keywords. This is searchable by
apt-cache search <keyword>
> That would enable prospective users to search an
> apt proxy for relevant software:)) It would also allow later versions of
> an app to have its keyword list ammended to reflect the changed
> focus/abilities of the app.
For sure.
> I hope this suggestion doesn't throw a spanner in the works:)
In fact I see no way that suggestions could do any harm to the works.
Just do your suggestions open to the list to open some discussion.
Kind regards and thanks for your ideas
Andreas.
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