Comps/groups/tags-concepts [Was: FESCo Meeting Summary for 2008-10-29]

[Seth Vidal]

On Mon, 3 Nov 2008, James Antill wrote:

>
> What makes the keywords smaller/bigger? The only way this works in
> del.icio.us/etc. is that you have some kind of popularity metric, where
> is that going to live and how is it going to be done? If "popularity" ==
> number of packages in a group/tag ... then it'll be complete fail, IMO.

Smaller/bigger based on how often the tag appears in any given package. 
Look at how it is done in flickr. That's the gist of it.

>
> Also how do we display this on the cmd line?

Either:

1. we don't.
or
2. sorted most common first and have a cutoff limit on it.


> Also, as Jeremy said, I haven't seen anyone say what they want the
> "new" thing to be or do ... just that what we have kind of sucks (in
> various ways). At a quick guess at that we have:
>
> 1. PK doesn't use it, by default.

- that's not a technical problem afaict.

> 2. No easy way to create custom groups for the user.

- that's unrelated to this classification, though.

> 3. Not wasy way for packagers to add/remove their packages from groups.

- which is the point of tying this metadata into the pkgdb interface and 
having it dump out a static file. Then the packager can add keywords 
through the pkgdb

> 4. "groupremove KDE" removes GNOME stuff, etc.

- not really related to search/browse enhancement via keyword.

> 5. "groupinstall FOO" && "groupremove FOO" should act like a noop.

- also not really related


> 6. Groups should be able to depend on groups, so we don't duplicate
> data.
> 7. Groups depending on groups is insane.

- groupreq is doable in current infrastructure. Figuring out how to make 
that behave with installs/removes is ugly, of course.

> 8. hierarchical groups (even though we only have 2 levels) "sucks" and
> confuses people / is too advanced / etc.

- but tag browsing (which can ultimately be hierarchical doesn't seem to 
boggle too many folks. See Flickr - seriously.

> 9. non-hierarchical groups "sucks" for 10,000 - 20,000 pkgs all in at
> least one group.

- see above

> 11. More than 100 groups is unusable.

Which is what tags/popular tags is about.


Categorizing thousands of items is pain. Period. Figuring out a way to 
make it semi-sanely browseable might not be AS excruciating.

-sv