Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Duane Malcolm <d.malcolm AT auckland.ac.nz>]

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?