RE: Oop customization group

["Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

>  > Group inheritance can be multiple. This is essentially a tagging
>  > mechanism (in the sense of del.icio.us tags, not Emacs tags),
> 
> No, it's not, not until the UI reflects that.

You seem to be in violent agreement. ;-)

That was my point (in part). Groups are not really more than tags, because of
multiple inheritance and because this "inheritance" is so loose that it is
merely a kind of cross referencing ("see also") - you can even have group A that
inherits from a group B that inherits from A.

Groups are not more than tags in terms of their semantics, and they are less
than tags when it comes to UI. As I suggested, and as you reiterate, the UI is
not by design a tagging UI. 

That was my point in bringing this up: Since groups are nothing more than
arbitrary labels/tags, should we not perhaps provide a UI that is more in line
with the tagging and tag-searching UIs one sees today?

> If we're going to go in the direction of d.i.u-style tagging, what I
> think is needed is some way to communicate users' idea (ie, some sort
> of consensus which may still be somewhat ambiguous or confused, not
> coherent, well-thought-out individual systems) to the distribution.

Locally, that could come naturally, I think, if the UI were more tag-like.
Either on an individual basis or collectively among users at the same site, user
tagging would be reflected in the resultant tag set ("group hierarchy").
Regardless of the UI, that is what happens now, when users define groups that
other (local) users can see.

But yes, it could be useful to somehow integrate tagging by the wider user
community, so that it becomes part of Emacs, that is, part of a local Emacs
installation or a local Emacs session. Given Internet access, the tag set
available locally could dynamically (at least on demand) be made to reflect
tagging by users at large. 

How best to do that, I don't know - I'm pretty ignorant about this stuff.
Perhaps gnu.org could have a Web service that would federate user tagging, and
which could be used to update one's local Emacs. That is, local tagging by users
could be pushed out, and tags collected from non-local users could be pulled in.