Re: [gentoo-dev] Are tags just sets?

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 1:49 AM, Ciaran McCreesh
<ciaran.mccreesh@googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 26 Jun 2011 17:12:27 +0200
> Maciej Mrozowski <reavertm@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Sets concept is completely orthogonal to tags concept, please do not
>> mix unrelated things.
>
> Depends upon what you think the "tags concept" is. We've already
> established that everyone has a different idea of what tags are anyway.

I too feel that tags should be distinct from sets, for a bunch of reasons.

Sets should really be something carefully controlled by the
repository.  While I'm fine with having tags in the repository also,
there is talk about giving users ways of supplying them as well.

Sets are generally used to tell the package manager to do something
with a lot of packages at once.  I'm not sure there is much of a need
to do this with tags, at least not in most of the use cases that have
been suggested.

Here is how I see tags being used:

1.  I want a WYSIWYG html editor.
2.  I search for tags like "editor" and "html" and "WYSIWYG" and maybe
even "text."
3.  I check out descriptions and homepages or whatever for a few
likely candidates, and install one or maybe two.

What I doubt I'd ever do is just install any package that has anything
to do with text/html editing.  When you search google you care about
the top 5-10 - not the whole set of results.

Maybe if we define multiple namespaces for tags we could move to using
tags as dependencies or whatever, and those tags would be distinct and
much more carefully defined and controlled.  However, I think this is
more far-out and not the immediate goal.

Sets might work, but they seem a bit like a hack...

Rich