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  • From: Duane Malcolm <d.malcolm AT auckland.ac.nz>
  • To: Arwed von Merkatz <v.merkatz AT gmx.net>
  • Cc: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] alternative grimoire layout
  • Date: Wed, 06 Apr 2005 08:25:02 +1200

Hi all,

There are two separate issues here:

1. Adding KEYWORDS to the DETAILS file

2. Naming sections

They have independent advantages and disadvantage. They can be discussed and implemented separately. Disadvantages of one should not lie on the other.

Cheers, Duane

Arwed von Merkatz wrote:
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?





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