[Haskell-cafe] Subcategories on Hackage

[Tillmann Vogt]

Am 04.06.2011 11:08, schrieb Vo Minh Thu:
> 2011/6/4 Tillmann Vogt<Tillmann.Vogt at rwth-aachen.de>:
>> Hi,
>>
>> There are some categories on Hackage that have become so large that it is
>> hard to find something, i.e. Data(414 packages) and Graphics (191). Thats
>> why I suggest to use subcategories separated from the category with a dot.
>> To show that this makes sense I made subcategories for graphics libraries at
>> the end of this email.
>> Whatever happens to hackage2 this would be an immediate improvement.
>>
>> How
>> ------
>> I would volunteer for the manual categorization and let the community look
>> over it.
>> I could upload the changes with a script but the version number has to
>> increase even if only the category has changed. I also don't want to be
>> responsible for a massive spike in the upload statistics.
>> Shouldn't the cabal file be excluded from the versioning policy? =>  It is
>> allowed to upload a library with the same version number if only the cabal
>> file has changed. One should write a notifiaction mail to all owners to
>> reply if they don't agree. Then after a week executing the script that
>> applies the changes.
>>
>> [snip]
> Hi,
>
> I would simply prefer tags.
>
> Actually, there is a problem that becomes even worse in your proposal:
> packages appearing in multiple categories, and packages not appearing
> in some expected category.

Well, what is the difference between a tag and a category? The second 
sounds more mathematical.
A sub tag or a sub category is better because some categories have 
clearly a "sub" relation. I.e. I cannot imagine 2d-image-formats to be 
part of some other category than graphics. But generally I agree that 
more tags are also a solution, but how to display this without 
increasing the page size. So I think in the end it is tradeoff between 
display size and reasonable narrowing of where a category can belong.

> A simple example in your proposed categories: HDRUtils library: should
> it be in 2d, RasterFormats, or maybe in 2dFormats, ... with tags, 2d,
> raster, format, can be used, but also hdr, image, etc.

I don't mean that a library should appear in only one (sub-)category,  
HDRUtils may appear in all the categories you mention. but if someone 
wants to know what raster image formats are supported he immediately 
finds it ind RasterFormats.

> I don't remember what was proposed for hackage 2.
>
> Cheers,
> Thu
>
>