Re: Servers going online automatically?
On Tuesday, December 8, 2015 11:23 PM, Marc Haber <mh+debian-policy@zugschlus.de> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 08, 2015 at 08:44:22PM +0000, Vesa Paatero wrote:> > I understand. But maybe documenting such "affecting defaults" could
> > make sense if they were expressed as flags of some sort so that they
> > wouldn't make the descriptions too long. For example, text "[SERVER]"
> > at the bottom of the description could indicate that package
> > establishes a server on your computer -- and then all those bracketed
> > flags in use would be explained on some web page.
>
> Don't we already have a debtag to do so?
Yes... But in practice debtags just create intuitive categorizations and are not associated with exact Debian rules or definitions about things. For example, there is a tag called network::server but it is not associated with information about Debian practices regarding servers, such as their going automatically online after the first reboot after installation.
Debtags demonstrate, though, that such tag systems easily get quite large and complex and thus are probably not the key solution for helping users notice important things while they look at packages, considering what to install.
But yes, it would probably be good to make more use of debtags. So far I haven't come across debtags in any package manipulation programs, although they may have used them to show packages in categories. It would be nice to make the tags visible and search by them in Synaptic, for example.
Regards,
Vesa
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