[Debtags-devel] Facet restructuring - Proposal/Idea

[Benjamin Mesing]

Hello,

when I wrote my mail regarding the endless discussion between Enrico and
Erich, a new idea came to my mind.

As a lot of people have noted by now, some facets should be moved into
the use, work-with or other facets. Enrico delayed this due to UI issues
that need to be solved. I have a proposal how to reduce the UI problems
(forgive me if this one has already been made, but I can't remember such
a proposal).

We could assign all facets and tags (or perhaps only the tags) a
priority marking the importance of the relevant tag. This would allow
two improvements:
     1. show most significant tags first
     2. move very, very important tags up one level the hierarchy (So
        tags located directly beneath a facet would be displayed on the
        same level as facets). E.g. if we move devel to use::devel and
        it's priority would be say: 0 it would be displayed as
        use::devel in the next to the facets including use.

There are some things that need to be considered. 
I think the scoring should be done manually, or at most
semi-automatically. Here the number of packages tagged with a given tag
might give an indicator regarding its relevance. Or even better a
weighted score based on the popcon rating of all the packages that are
tagged with a given tag.
Another question is, if the facet where a tag originally belonged to
should be shown in the name in case the tag was moved up. But this is
only a UI issue (and I would vote for 'yes' :-)

One advantage of such a system would be that it would not break any
existing applications (only a priority field needs to be added to the
vocabulary). As I admit that it might lead to some work (and probably
some controversies) to priorities all tags, and it would also require
some efforts on the UI end, I suggest this to be a post-etch issue (in
case it is considered to be a good idea at all).

Greetings Ben