Which DebTag for Debian-Med ?

[Andreas Tille]

On Mon, 8 Jan 2007, Thijs Kinkhorst wrote:

> I do not think that "suite" is the right choice, tagging with "field" is
> much more useful; as you can see, under "field" are such fields as
> astronomy, biology and chemistry already available. Adding
> "field::medicine" would be useful to me, and to put subclasses of
> medicine below it:
>
> examples:
>
> 	field::medicine:pharmacy
> 	field::medicine:imaging
> 	field::medicine:practice
> 	field::medicine:veterinary
>
> But well, I leave the final decision to the debtags developers, since
> they are most known with the design of the tags database. But please,
> whatever it is, decide on it somewhere soon so we can start :)

Fully ACK.

> I do not think that Charles' patch is appropriate in the sense that the
> descriptions are not right. They describe the meta data in terms of
> other meta data ("This package is installed [...] by the [...]
> metapackage."), and as such a tag does not provide any new information.
> In fact, a widespread tagging system could make meta packages obsolete
> at some point. The descriptions of the tags should be more in the range
> of "Useful with micro-biology in medical reseach" for med-bio.

Well, DebTags are quite flexible and are a really good tool to select
packages.  On the other hand meta packages do contain a little bit
more then just dependencies.  They contain currently user menus, extra
documentation and there are also some more things planed where I do not
really see a replacement by only using DebTags.  Moreover the dependency
system is stronger if you want to warn the admin against removing
packages that should not be removed.

This should not sound as I would be really keen on preserving meta
packages for ever.  I just have not seen a fully replacement.

Kind regards

          Andreas.

-- 
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