Re: Package categories

[Chris Walker <chrisw@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org> writes:

> Le Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 07:03:58PM +0100, Chris Walker a écrit :
> > 
> > The debtags available don't seem to have quite enough granularity -
> > but perhaps I've missed something - so I've knocked up a very
> > incomplete list of sections that packages might drop into.
> 
> Hi Chris,
> 
> If I understand correctly, the Debtags are not granular on puropse.
> Better categorisation is supposed to be acheived by combining them. 

Yes. Furthermore, there are some programs that cross categories. For
example, if one were to propose a tag Field::Crystallography [1], then
that tag would be appropriate to molecular visualisation programs that
had support for crystals - eg by allowing multiple unit cells etc.


> For
> instance Field::Chemistry, Use::Viewer instead of
> Field::Chemistry:Molecular grahpics.

How does that distinguish it from the plotting program kst [2] - which
is currently tagged Field::Chemistry and use::viewing

Is kst incorrectly tagged? If not, should all the other scientific
plotting programs be tagged chemistry too - or does kst have some
chemistry specific features?


> This said, there are cases where creating subfacets are definitely the
> best solution. For instance for biology, we obtained the creation of the
> Field::Biology:molecular, :bioinformatics and :structural subfacets.

As well as 

    * biology::emboss: EMBOSS
      Packages related to the European Molecular Biology Open Software Suite.

    * biology::format:aln: Clustal/ALN
      Used in multiple alignment of biological sequences.

    * biology::format:fasta: Nexus
      Popular format for phylogenetic trees.

    * biology::nuceleic-acids: Nucleic Acids Software that works with
      sequences of nucleic acids: DNA, RNA but also non-natural
      nucleic acids such as PNA or LNA.

    * biology::peptidic: Proteins
      Software that works with sequences of aminoacids: peptides and proteins.


Can someone explain the rationale for having both field::biology and
biology::*.


Chris


[1] I do wonder about a field::cystallography - to encompas packages
for real and reciprocal space study (X-ray, neutron and electron
diffraction) of crystalline materials.

[2] kst: "A KDE application used for displaying scientific data

    This is a metapackage for kst which installs all of the relevant packages.

    kst is a program for examining data streams which can plot x-y
    plots, power spectra, histograms and equations (including
    equations of data streams). It can also be used to examine data in
    files which are being updated as data is being logged, in which
    case it can act as a plotter for a chart recorder.