Versioned tag information

Benjamin Mesing bensmail at gmx.net
Sun Feb 4 15:19:17 CET 2007


Hello,

> > The idea is somewhat borrowed from versioned bugs. If a tag is added to
> > a package, the tag is submitted together with the version information
> > for the package.
> 
> This is something you already get for free with tags declared in the control
> file.

Not exactly. Tags declared in the control file are missing the part,
that information is propagated from older versions to newer ones. 

Additionally we could do vocabulary rearrangements (like renames) simply
by adding the rename to the central repository.


> > Finally the maintainer could do the tagging using two fields in the
> > control file. One for defining diffs, and one for totally redefining the
> > whole tag-set.
> >         Tags-Diff: +tag1, +tag2, -tag3
> > and
> >         Tag-Set: tag1, tag2, tag3, tag4, tag5
> 
> Why the need to have two different fields?
> Wouldn't be a single Tags: field be enough?

Not with the approach I was suggesting. 
The Tags-Diff: field defines a diff of tagging, regardless of whatever
the tag set was before is. So if some package has gained a feature in a
version I would add the appropriate tag to the package using [+tag].
This way, if someone tags an older version with a different tag, the tag
will be propageted to the newer version.
The Tag-Set: field sets a new starting point for subsequent diffs.

Basically it all comes down to the question: Who is doing the tagging?
I used to be in favour of the "tagging is soly the responsibility of the
maintainer" approach. But after the arguments presented I am not so sure
any more. 
Look at wikis for example, usually they are more up-to-date than
traditional webpages. Especially if the web-site maintainer is
unresponsive. For Debian, were we have more than a thousand maintainers,
there are usually some ones MIA. Control fields are very static, a tag
rename could take ages to ripple through the archive. Also, once a
Debian distribution is release, there is no way to change the tagging
information. IMO leaving the possibility to fix the tagging open, would
be benefitial.

Regards Ben




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