Python prototypes and smart search GUI

[Benjamin Mesing]

Hello

> Do it.  Really.  Now.
Ok, done, even though I had to remove gdeskcal for that ;-)


>   tagsByRelevance
>     Gets debtags data and a package list on input, and outputs the tags
>     sorted by how relevant they are to that subset of packages.  The
>     last tags are the most relevant.  This can be used to study the
>     relevance algorithm, and it's 34 lines of code.
> 
>     Use: apt-cache search image editor | ./tagsByRelevance /var/lib/debtags/package-tags | tail -20
So these relevance functions are some kind of magic going on ;-)
However, looking at the current formular, one thing seems a bit weird to
me (I've removed some syntactic sugar and changed some braces for
readability..):

        sub.card(tag) / full.card(tag) * sqrt[full.card(tag) / full.packageCount()]

Why do you divide by full.packageCount() inside the square root? As long
as the full collection stays the same for all tags (which I suppose it
does) this will not change the relation between packages. This is,
because the equation can be rewritten to:
        
        [ sub.card(tag) / full.card(tag) * sqrt(full.card(tag)) ] / sqrt(full.packageCount())

and the additional factor would be meaningless for the '<' '=' '>'
relations (as long as it is positive anyways...).

>   wxssearch
>     GUI prototype of a smartsearch interface.  The interaction feels
>     quite good, at least to me.
>     
>     Quirk: you may need to resize the window so that the tags on the
>     left don't wrap to the next line.  I don't know how to easily solve
>     that, besides implementing from scratch a custom widget for it.
>     
>     Check the help menu: it's got an introduction in the about box and
>     context-sensitive help.  Wow! :)
> 
>     Use: ./wxsearch
> 	 then input the keywords in the search box and search for
> 	 packages using the tags that appear below.
Cool, a UI tool to try out :-)
Very good, I think a very useful feature is, to be able to enter a new
search expression to get a new tag set. This allows for an incremental
search using tags. I think I will steal some ideas there :-)

Regards 

Ben