Hi simon,

> In addition to your proposal which LGTM, maybe we could also use the
> ’upstream-name’ properties.  Most of the time, the Guix name matches the
> upstream name, but sometimes not.  Although, it would not fix the issue
> for ggplot2 since there is no upstream-name for this package. :-)
I agree that using the upstream-name would be a good idea.

>  2. set the “namespace” weight to 1 (or 2 if you prefer)
> 
>     Otherwise, for example, generic name as CSV could artificially bump
>     the relevance and hide relevant packages.  For instance, compare
> 
>        guix search csv
The issue here is we don’t know what the user is searching for. If we
add more weight to the package name then usually libraries (rust-csv,
ghc-csv, …) win. Imo a search for “csv” should return tools to
manipulate CSV files like csvkit, csvdiff, xlsx2csv, … Just like
“json” should yield tools like jq, json.sh and possibly others which
I cannot find right now. But maybe I’m searching for a C library that
parses CSV instead. And then what…?

As for ggplot2, the particular issue seems to be that scores are added
for each match and the description for some of our packages contains
“ggplot2” alot. So I tried using MAX instead of +, which works,
but results in little variation of scores and thus weird sort order
(descending by name). It does not feel like an improvement either.

Cheers,
Lars

-- 
Lars-Dominik Braun
Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter/Research Associate

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