Source Views
(This is a more detailled and hopefully better structured explanation of the topic of my Lightning Talk during Debconf)
With the ever growing number of packages in our archive we need ever better methods to structure, sort, and search this collection. While projects like debtags try to improve the search in packages, my idea is about improving the way the results are displayed.
There is one relation between packages that is currently never strongly featured when presenting package meta-data: the source ↔ binary relation.
Usually package managers operate either on binary packages or source packages, but seldomly do they expose the fact that one is generated from the other.
In the trivial case of one source package producing one binary package there is probably nothing to gain. But there are a large number of source packages where this isn't true (at the moment about 29% of all the source packages in main build more than one binary package, together producing about 61% of all binary packages).
I have the idea (which so far is nothing more) that if we could present packages through their source packages that this could drastically reduce the number of packages to choose from and make some common search actions more effective.
This is not by any meaning a trivial task, though, since on the other hand not all source packages necessarily produce binary packages that have much to do with each other, and even for the ones that do, the exact relationship between the binary packages can vary greatly. Also some source packages are really belonging together but are split to make maintenance easier (e.g. KDE and X.org). These splits might not necessarily make any sense to an user.
Some ideas what to implement in terms of code to make it easier to let the user benefit from the fact that multiple binaries have the same source:
- Add support for a Description field for source packages.
- For bonus points implement automatic substvars ${source:Description}, ${source:Short-Description}, and ${source:Long-Description} that make it trivial to reuse (parts of) that description in the descriptions of the binary packages.
- Add some way to identify the "main" package built from a common source.
- Identify source package usage patterns.
- There are a lot of source packages that share common patterns
about what they build. Example patterns include:
- Application
- Main package + -data package + -doc package + ...
- Library
- -dev package + shlib package + -doc package + ...
- Application + Library
- Collection of Applications
- etc.
Created 2008-08-21 by Frank Lichtenheld, category /en/devel/debian. permanent link, 0 comment(s)
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