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

[Erich Schubert]

Hi,

> 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.

Actually when I read the tag "linguistics", that would be a candidate
to filter out for me - I don't do linguistics. For me this mostly
means research about the meaning, origin and such of languages.
Whereas speech synthesis is maybe phonetics, but otherwise it's just
audio... ;-)
Dictionaries, spellchecking and such are "language tools", but not
really linguistics.

> > Tag: interface::automated
> > Description: Scripted invocation

In my opinion an "interface::scripted" is fine, this would for example
apply to perl etc., too.
But there probably are examples of applications that do not have a
real command line interface but that do have a scripting interface.
Maybe openoffice, or some apache module...

But it's not clear to me how useful this is.

> 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.

Maybe we could somehow put these sound tags such as oss and alsa into
some "dormant" state, where they continue to exist in our database,
but for example are not exported to the packages file.

I don't see much use in having separate oss and alsa tags. I do agree
that for completeness we then should have ess, nas, arts and jack
tags, too... just to name the four most common sound daemons. Many
libraries or apps (alsaplayer, SDL, ...) have packages to work with
one or the other, it would seem inconsistent if the alsa output plugin
has an extra tag, the esd output plugin hasn't.

> 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'.

Well, maybe we should merge these. And just use a made-of::data-doc or so.
We don't need as many tags as possible...

[metadata tag]
> 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.

OTOH I like merging the id3 tags, ogg tags and such information into a tag.
(please spellcheck auxiliary)

Tag: works-with::metadata
Description: Process auxiliary information (metadata) of data
  Applications that work on auxiliary information of data such as ID3 tags,
  EXIF image information, Author or attributes. This includes, but is
not limited
  to information organizers such as image and music galleries.

yeah, by far not yet perfect...
File names and permissions are some kind of metadata, that's true. But
somehow I wouldn't count them as metadata of the data, but of the
files (or storage). I.e. supposedly two copies of the same file have
the same metadata, but they may have different file names and file
attributes.

best regards,
Erich Schubert
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