[Debtags-devel] Other tags for which I have some doubt (was: Proposed Debtags goals for Etch)

[Enrico Zini]

[Note: I'm replying many mails at once, heavily reorganising the quote
 to put the various subtopics together, and splitting the result in
 different replies to start distinct subthreads.]

[puff.. pant.. there was a lot of content in those mails!  Which is
 so good, but it's quite a lot of work to reply]

On Sun, Jul 17, 2005 at 09:42:38PM +0100, Justin B Rye wrote:

> Tag: field::linguistics
> Description: Linguistics and (human) languages
>  (Or perhaps ::language, but I'm showing my personal bias here.
>  This covers festival, praat, tipa, translate...  Meanwhile,
>  field::geology looks to me like a dud.)

I am not very familiar with linguistics and you [Justin] are.

However, I had a search with 'dict' and I got that linguistics is "The
science of languages, or of the origin, signification, and application
of words; glossology.".

All the packages you've mentioned are about speech synthesis and
splitting a phrase down into phonemes, while with field::linguistics I'd
expect something more like etimologic dictionaries.

So, in the end, I wouldn't mind adding it, but I feel like asking:

  Are you sure?  [Yes] [No]

before proceeding. :)


> Tag: interface::automated
> Description: Scripted invocation
>  (A distinctly pedantic extra category for things that normally run
>  out of loginscripts, crontabs, etc rather than being either direct
>  end-user commands or true daemons; includes window-managers, backup
>  systems, ssh-agent, logrotate, popularity-contest, infrastructure
>  updaters like defoma...)

Except for window-managers, which really have an X11 interactive
interface, all of the others have a commandline interface.  I don't know
how useful it is to operate this distiction, as it's quite implicit in
the concept of 'commandline interface' that they're intended for using
inside some script or some automatic system.



On Mon, Jul 18, 2005 at 06:39:06PM +0100, Justin B Rye wrote:
> Benjamin Mesing wrote:
> >> Tag: sound::oss
> >> Description: OSS - Open Sound System
> >> Tag: sound::alsa
> >> Description: ALSA - Advanced Linux Sound Architecture
> > Hmm, do we really need this -> this would also require to add
> > sound::esd, sound::nas,...
> Would it really require that?  I don't know much about NAS, but
> Esound definitely depends on your soundcard first being set up to
> work with *either* OSS *or* ALSA.  Still, I can see that people
> who don't own antique soundcards like mine are likely to see these
> as more trouble than they're worth. 

I'd rather skip this for the moment.  Free Ekanayaka (of Agnula fame)
has since some time agreed to take care of the sound facet for us.

Now, it's true that he hasn't done it yet; however, I know where he
lives and it's just 25Km from my house, so anytime you want the sound
facet sorted out, drop me a message and I'll go to make sure he does his
job ;)


On Sun, Jul 17, 2005 at 09:42:38PM +0100, Justin B Rye wrote:
> Tag: works-with::man
> Description: troff-formatted manual pages
[...]
On Mon, Jul 18, 2005 at 08:26:32PM +0200, Benjamin Mesing wrote:
> > > We have work-with::plain-text and ::textdocument. Btw. what about this
> > > distinction? It seems a little bit fuzzy to me. But perhaps it was only
> > > the description which confused me. However nothing better comes to my
> > > mind.
> > Textdocument covers all the formats that display as text but contain
> > more than just flat strings of characters - .rtf, .html, .doc... The
> > format:: facet is more specific but doesn't cover man and info,
> > which I'd use on things like info2man, exim4-doc-info and manedit.
> Currenlty the man and info are tagged with works-with::textdocument and
> in my opinion this is a fine enough distinction.

I'm happy to add the made-of::data-info (maybe people like (or don't
like) info documentation).  I'm a bit less sure of made-of::data-man, as
I don't know of packages that only contain manpages besides
'asr-manpages'.

About the works-with, I'm happy to add both: I've been looking for a
manpage editor, or an info file converter.

I've thus added these:

Tag: made-of::data-info
Description: Documentation in Info format
Tag: works-with::text-info
Description: Documentation in Info format
Tag: works-with::text-man
Description: Manpages

And I'd skip made-of::data-man for now.



On Sun, Jul 17, 2005 at 09:42:38PM +0100, Justin B Rye wrote:
> Tag: works-with::metadata
> Description: File metadata
>  (For ID3-taggers, EXIF data-dumpers, ogg collection organisers,
>  libextract etc)
On Mon, Jul 18, 2005 at 09:52:51AM +0200, Benjamin Mesing wrote:
> > Tag: works-with::metadata
> > Description: File metadata
> >  (For ID3-taggers, EXIF data-dumpers, ogg collection organisers,
> >  libextract etc)
> I would leave this to the special domain the meta data belongs to: i.e.
> works-with::{sound,rasterimage,...}.

At the moment I tend to agree with Benjamin: while I sincerely care
about metadata (ehi, that's what Debtags is about!), the very definition
of metadata is still quite loose.  File names, permissions and
timestamps are metadata as well, and we risk getting confused.

However, I can see a wave of programs to store "data about files":
debtags and beagle (not yet in Debian) in addition of what you all
mentioned in this thread.  And I will want to be able to search among
them.

Let's put it like this: I'll be happy to add this tag, as soon as
someone comes out with a good, clear Description for it.



On Mon, Jul 18, 2005 at 10:25:27AM +0200, Benjamin Mesing wrote:
> on my search for a zip tool today I stumbled about a missing use tag:
> use::compressing. This would obsolete sound::compression (or if we want
> to keep it sound::compression implies use::compressing). I think this is
> much more expressive than use::storing (the use tag "zip") currently
> has.

Great!  Added.

On Mon, Jul 18, 2005 at 06:39:13PM +0100, Justin B Rye wrote:
> So I think you're right about the need for a new tag.  Since there
> are apps for extracting from nonfree compressed-archive formats,
> the tagname (or at least the description) should make it clear that
> decompression-only tools get this tag too. 

I've used:

Tag: use::compressing
Description: Compressing

Assuming that people would have no problem in looking for decompressors
under "Compressing".  I can change it if you don't think it would work.


Ciao,

Enrico "wow!  this is the last one in the bunch!"

--
GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico at enricozini.org>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/debtags-devel/attachments/20050723/06f64a2f/attachment-0001.pgp