Re: Adding tags to packages

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Fabio Pesari <fabiop@gnu.org> skribis:

> In short, I think tags are a simple solution to a problem that's been
> around for many years, and the fact that it wasn't done properly in the
> past is purely anecdotal and doesn't mean it can't be done properly now.

As discussed before¹, even though I’m sympathetic to the approach, I
believe experience suggests that tags are not a success.

The main reason is probably that it provides a UI that’s more “complex”
than plain-text/regexp search, and that plain-text search works “well
enough” most of the time.

As Alex writes, one can always choose not to use tags; this would be an
argument for implementing them.  However, it seems to me that the cost
of implementing and maintaining them would be high enough (the
implementation itself may not be that trivial if we want a query
language, i18n, RDF(?), and whatnot.)

What about exploring ways to improve --search?

I can think of a very simple improvement to make: make it so that

  guix package -s '\<board\>' -s game

returns packages that match *both* regexps instead of one or the other
as is currently the case?  We could make a similar change in guix.el.

A second idea would be to rank search matches based on the number of
occurrences of the regexps and their location (package name
vs. description.)

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Ludo’.

¹ https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2015-07/msg00198.html