Request: multiple categories for libraries

[Simon Marlow]

Ross Paterson wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 15, 2007 at 06:12:38PM -0800, Conal Elliott wrote:
> 
>>To be more clear, I meant my request in the context of Cabal & Hackage.  I'd
>>like to give a comma-separated list of categories (tags) in my .cabal,
>>register it with Hackage, and have my package show up under each named
>>category in http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/pkg-list.html .
> 
> 
> It's already there (though undocumented), e.g. the Win32 package has
> 
> 	category: System, Graphics
> 
> but people think we need something more elaborate, see
> 
> 	http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/wiki/HackageToDo

With the number of packages we have, I think it would be counterproductive to 
over-generalise with a complex tagging scheme, at least for now.  With all that 
generality comes a lot of work: we'd have to worry about keeping our tags 
accurate and our tagging scheme relevant, worry about how our tags related to 
Debian's tags and propagate tags in both directions, develop much more complex 
interfaces (both web and command-line) for searching and navigating the tags, 
etc. etc.

Also there's overlap between the facet:tag idea and the metadata we already have 
in Cabal packages.  Why should e.g. implemented-in::Haskell be a tag, but 
'extensions: FFI' be a field in the package description?

I suggest if there are a few important facet-like things that we want to use to 
categorise packages, then we add them as fields to the package description.

Cheers,
	Simon