Status of the tag database, with a focus on libs

[Enrico Zini]

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Hello.

I've been using debtags and the "related" function has already brought
me out of trouble fast more than once, with my *immense* satisfaction!

This means that debtags kinda works, but also that the database contains
good data already, which is great, considering the huge amount of
software we're coping with.

I'd say that the current tag data is quite solid now for what concerns
programs and applications, and tag proposals are coming in to handle
some not yet covered spots like enabling technologies and genealogy.


One area that I've found lacking was libraries.  Today I tried to look
for a C++ thread library, but "debtags related libboost-thread-dev"
gave me 214 matches, and showed me an area of the database that is
probably lacking.

What is the status of tags for libraries?  There is such a lot of
library packages around, and they probably need a fair amount of
specialized tag coverage.

We have 3021 packages with the name starting with "lib" at the moment,
with 851 ending with "-dev", 536 with "-perl", 116 with "-doc", 87 with
"-ruby" and 86 with "-java": this is definitely going to be an area to
be kept in consideration.

Is there some ready-made onthology for software components?  If not, we
are in need of some software design know-how.

Language tags can already be applied to libs: c, c++, perl, python and
so on are already present and ready for use.

Other tags can be by functionality provided by the library: thread, net
(and then multicast, distributed-programming), logging, term, xml, acl,
authentication, database, client-libs, math, text, music, sound, debian,
graphics, ipc, 3d, crypto, debug, widgets, time, mail, mime, access to
data in some format, commandline parser, print, games, hardware,
software building blocks, unicode, web, uri, video, scripting, plugin.

Most of these last tags are the same tag used with non-libraries, others
might need to be added, like "software building block" (I'm thinking of
things like libsigc++ or "ipc".


Is there some missing infrastructure I could provide on this one, or
we're just waiting for people to start tagging libs, too?

In the second case, if tags for libs are already in place, I could send
a message like this in -devel asking for people using and maintaining
libs to make some contribution to the package browser.


				Ciao! Enrico

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GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico@debian.org>

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