Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Ethan Grammatikidis <eekee57 AT fastmail.fm>]

On Fri, 1 Feb 2008 12:14:10 -0500
flux <flux AT sourcemage.org> wrote:

> This is just an idea I had, so I don't mind if it gets completely shot
> down, or if it sounds good but would be too much of a pita to
> implement ;).
> 
> It seems that a lot of people are for the use of keywords, and that
> they in fact already exist in the grimoires. There is some argument
> as to which keywords should be used (though not much), but also some
> things have been floating around about getting rid of the sections in
> the grimoires because they aren't always as accessible to users, etc.
> 
> My idea came when I was observing the grimoires themselves. We have
> local grimoires, where the user can completely customize everything.
> This is a great idea, and allows us to have a lot more flexibility
> than some other distros with ease. Why not local keywords? We can
> keep all the sections the same, and with local keywords the user can
> group things any way they like superficially. I'm not sure how much
> extra work would be required to actually get something usable out of
> this, but if it is doable it would defeat the problem of no
> categorization truly being liked by all. It might also help with
> enabling "personalized" maintainer sections while keeping the
> sections we have now.
> 
> As I currently understand things, this would involve coding in new
> options mainly to gaze, but possibly some additions to sorcery (not
> sure), and new options to scribe/scribbler. I'm also not sure how
> indexing should be handled (i.e. for more efficient handling, should
> there be a regular grimoire index for the sections, as well as a
> separate index for any local keywords the user might have?).
> 
> If this is a silly idea, someone say so and then ignore this :). I
> just thought this might be like having a dynamic tagged system
> overtop of a stable, static structure, which would hopefully bring
> the best of both worlds. Also, I think if we managed to implement
> something like this we would be the first distro to allow users to
> tag their own package db...

Unless you mean for tags to be uploaded to some central repo, so that 
everyone could benefit from everyone else's tags, this wouldn't be any use to 
myself. I don't know how representative I am of the general user base, but I 
only ever use gaze section to look for new stuff, never to find stuff I 
already know about, and here is the critical point: The sections are already 
broken! Sorcery's ability to have section-specific FUNCTIONS makes sections 
just too valuable as a code reuse mechanism, so that an audio player written 
in python is now in python-pypi, and won't be moving back to audio-players, 
and much the same goes for many other spells. To take 2 examples from the 
ruby-raa section, emai is there rather than in mail, and euphoria would also 
be expected to be in audio-players if the sections existed for human use. To 
put it concisely, the "stable, static structure" of sections is already of no 
use if one wants to find all the audio player programs or all the email 
programs,
  and I'm sure the same applies to other sections.

Personally, I'm rather in favour of a system where any user could apply a 
keyword to a spell and have that keyword accessible by all other users, a la 
community websites. If I understand right, the use of keywords in sorcery is 
being held back by the lack of a definitive and exhaustive list of keywords 
which shall be used, but rigid, definitive lists in general require a lot of 
effort to produce, require further careful work when any modification has to 
be made, and can't really hope to cover all bases anyway.