"guix search" needs your help

"guix search" needs your help

[zimoun]

Dear,

I am lacking imagination and I need your help for:
 - what should be the query you type,
 - then what is the package you expect with such query, in order.

Example:

  guix search source control management
  # expect: git, mercurial, svn, then other

  guix search r cytometry
  # expect: r-flowcore r-flowsom then other


Using your imagination, I can benchmark some ranking functions.


As reported, the experience with "guix search" is sometimes poor.
Aside the issue of pager or output format,  there is 2 explorations
for improvements discussed in this bug report [1]: faster and more
accurate.  The benchmark for "faster" is straightforward and the
exploration is on going. :-)

Currently, the packages are ranked accordingly to 'relevance'.  There
is good, bad and ugly about this strategy and the state-of-art Okapi
BM25 ranking function has to be evaluated to know if such information
retrieval strategy is worth or not for search of packages.  Well,
thanks to Arun guile-xapian bindings, the BM25 ranking is easy to
benchmark since all the tough work is relayed to Xapian.

[1] http://issues.guix.gnu.org/39258


From my point of view, such pair (query terms, expected packages)
would help to improve the tools:
 - maybe "guix search"
 - maybe "guix lint" by establishing some metrics indicating is the
synopsis and description are relevant -- compared to all the other
packages.


Thank you in advance for help me in the exploration of such ideas.

Best regards,
simon