Re: A proposal for a friendlier Emacs

[Alexander Adolf]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> [...]
> Thanks, but I think we may be miscommunicating.  A package can belong
> to more than one category -- what do you propose to do in that case?

Let it have one and only one category, and as many tags as the package's
author wishes.

To my experience, whenever people say "I need more than one category",
the motivation is always to enable users to find the thing under several
search terms. Something which is conveniently achieved by
tags. Technically, the only difference between "category" and "tag" in
my proposal is that special semantics are attached to the "category"
(determines which init file stuff goes into), whereas no semantics are
attached to "tag". When searching, a package hosting website (or a
client thereof) would of course match on both, categories and tags.

Also, classifications (like ontologies in general) are not
context-free. In a wider context, such as e.g. Emacs, the
classifications "email", and "web" might be useful. In a list of
web-browser plugins, a "web" category would hardly make sense. Likewise
for "email" in a list of plugins for an email client.

By means of example, below a random short-list of packages on ELPA, with
fictional category, and tags assigned by my humble self:

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
 package        category  tags                                                  
   
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 ada-mode       progn     ada, programming, fontification, navigation, 
indentation 
 adaptive-wrap  text      wrap, visual, long-lines                              
   
 arbitools      games     chess, tournamet, report, logging                     
   
 wpuzzle        games     text, puzzle, scarbble, words                         
   
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Searching for "text" in this set, would deliver adaptive-wrap, and
wpuzzle as the results.

And yes, assigning a single category only to a non-trivial thing is
essentially an arbitrary act. Think of when you last browsed archives of
TV or cinematic content on different platforms. One and the same piece
of content goes down as "romance" on one platform, and as "comedy" on
another one. Hence, again to my experience, it is pointless to let a
community choose the category; the discussion will never end. Let
someone who can claim some sort of authority over the thing (e.g. its
author, or its publisher) take his/her arbitrary decision what the
category is.


Cheers,

  --alexander