Re: Adding tags to packages

[Ludovic Courtès]

Ricardo Wurmus <address@hidden> skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> As Alex writes, one can always choose not to use tags; this would be an
>> argument for implementing them.  However, it seems to me that the cost
>> of implementing and maintaining them would be high enough (the
>> implementation itself may not be that trivial if we want a query
>> language, i18n, RDF(?), and whatnot.)
>
> I understood the request to mean that a new field would be added that
> contained words or phrases that are not easily/naturally added to the
> description or synopsis field.  Search would just have to also check for
> matches against the strings contained in the proposed tags field.

Should it be just words or tuples?  Debtags does something relatively
fancy, like ‘works-with’ tag: <http://debtags.debian.net/reports/facets>.

> What would adding a query language for tags bring us that would outweigh
> the cost of implementing it?  Wouldn’t it solve most of the problems if
> we just added a field holding “additional” search terms for all those
> useful terms that are not otherwise contained in the description or
> synopsis?

As an example, Debtags comes with a query language:

  https://wiki.debian.org/Debtags/SearchHelp

Tags are more than keywords in this case.

The query language helps users make fine-grain searches.  I think tags
would be much less useful without it.  But this is non-trivial
development work.

Ludo’.