Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Flavien Bridault <f.bridault AT fra.net>]

Le mardi 05 avril 2005 à 11:32 +0200, Arwed von Merkatz a écrit :
> Hi everyone.
> 
> After thinking about the proposed grimoire layout changes for a while and a
> recent discussion on irc I'm proposing something completely different :)
> 
> Whatever section naming scheme we come up with, it will suck for some
> ways to look for spells. Currently sections actually define two things: 1) a
> broad category, 2) the maintainer. This doesn't really work out. Spells 
> should
> be maintained by people who use them, and who uses _all_ possible mail
> daemons we have in the mail section? We should decide what we want our
> sections to define, either a category _or_ the maintainer. What I'm
> proposing now is to make the sections define only the maintainer,
> together with some changes to sorcery and spells to support that.
> 
> We add a new KEYWORDS variable to DETAILS that contains all the keywords
> that apply to this spell. There will be an official list of keywords that
> spells can use, no spell should use any other keyword.
> 
> scribe reindex extracts all the KEYWORDS from all spells and generates an
> index file for them for fast keyword searching.
> 
> gaze gets some new commands:
> gaze list-keywords                    -- shows all available keywords
> gaze keyword <any number of keywords> -- shows all spells that have all 
> those
>                                          keywords in their DETAILS
> This essentially replaces gaze section. Together with gaze search it will 
> be a
> comfortable way to look for spells in the grimoire. Keywords will include 
> stuff
> like the environment(s) the spell can use, the genre of the spell, whether 
> it
> provides a server, ...
> Some examples for keyword searches:
> gaze keyword kde mail client
> gaze keyword audio plugin
> gaze keyword compiler
> ...
> 
> The keywords replace the categorizing sections we have right now.
> Sections are just a way to relate spells to maintainers, so we would have
> sections like eric_sandall, arwed_von_merkatz, ... and a section 
> unmaintained.
> Whenever someone decides to maintain a spell from unmaintained he moves it 
> to
> his section.
> This opens up the possiblity of people maintaining a very small set of 
> spells
> they care about, which would make it less intimidating for new people to
> become maintainers.
> 
> The one drawback I see with this solution is that we lose the option to 
> browse
> the grimoire easily with the shell/filemanagers, but a fast keyword search
> makes up for that.
> For other ways to browse the grimoire like the online spell listing it 
> wouldn't
> be hard to create that list categorised by keywords, or even with any 
> arbitrary
> hierarchy of keywords. For people really wanting a layout on the filesystem
> they can browse with the shell it would also be possible to provide a script
> that creates a symlink tree that points to the spells in the grimoire but is
> divided into directories by keywords.
> 
> What do you think?
> 
I like a lot the scheme proposed sooner by Jeremy, but this is true that
it will generate a lot of small sections, and it will not completely
resolved the problem that you highlight : "a maintainer of a spell is a
user of this spell".
I didn't really use shell of fm to browse the grimoire... I find that it
is anyway bad organized, for all the reasons that we already mentionned
since we begin to talk about this.
As we discussed on #sourcemage, every taxinomy you can make will be
arbitrary and can't describe a spell completely. You can take as an
example all the menus of some desktops or distributions (especially
Mandrake ;-) ), their classification is never ideal... Finally, it shows
that everybody think differently, and we can't satisfied everyone with
such a solution.

So, I think KEYWORDS can be finally a really good thing, especially if
it we take advantage of this to reorganize the grimoire to assign spells
to maintainers who uses them (for example I have spells like yaboot or
silo which don't compile on x86 !!)

In the case we will implement this, I wonder how you (since you're our
Grimoire Priest ;-) ) will assign spells as it is obvious that there
will be people who will ask for the same spells ?? I think we can base
on the current scheme of the maintained section. Current maintainers who
don't want some of their spells anymore could put them in unmaintained
section, or on a list of the wiki.
I believe that if we do this, we should first maintain a list on the
wiki, in order to this what scheme we would have, and see if there is
not too much unmaintained spells. This last point is what afraid me the
most.

-- 
-- -- -- -- -- -- --
Flavien Bridault
Source Mage GNU/Linux - Disk Section Guru

irc: vlaaad
jabber: vlaaad AT amessage.be

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