On 25 March 2014 03:55, Damien Levac <damien.le...@gmail.com> wrote: > A lot of people already replied to this question: package search. > > A trivial example, a user want to know all terminals available in portage. > Of course he could try a `emerge --searchdesc terminal`, but then he would > get anything mentioning terminal in the description: which would probably > include a lot of "terminal applications" which are not terminals > themselves... > > `emerge --search terminal` just doesn't cut it as "konsole" wouldn't be a > result but is a terminal emulator... > > On the other hand, terminals are spread through many categories > (gnome-terminal in gnome-base & konsole in kde-base to name the most > obvious example). > > Thus tags are a nice way for user to find the applications they want. >
This example for me suggests we'll need to have some kind of process of defining what tags should be used for what things, similar to how we have a process for global USE, mostly, because inconsistency is a bad thing here. Because looking at this example and the results of `eix -cS terminal`, I see lots of things that may also be ambiguously tagged "terminal" due to being a terminal based application. Thus, either "terminal-emulator" or "terminal-app" or similar tags seem necessary. emerge --search tag:terminal-app tag:jabber-client ( or similar ) should thus result in net-im/mcabber And now that we're starting to flesh out mock tags that may make sense, it quickly seems we'll eventually want some kind of tag hierarchy. But as long as the tag is restricted to [A-Za-z-]+ or similar, we should have enough syntactical space to add a hierarchy in later if we find out we need it. For the sake of avoiding bikeshed, we should avoid hierarchy until we've proven tags are useful and have discovered we really need hierarchy. YAGNI -- Kent
