Improving package managers
I noticed
two
posts on improving package
managers none of which mentions
Debtags.
Daniel Burrows
mentions various issues:
- the current sections in Synaptic are useless
- there are better keyword search technologies than strstr()
- we could use popularity contest data to sort results
- it would be cool to do amazon-like things using popcon data
David Nusinov
mentions that the
ideal package manager should look like Google, where you search for things
using just a simple one line text entry and pick from the results what you want
to install.
I should probably do a bit of recap of
things that have been going
on.
I'll go through that list again:
- The current sections in Synaptic are useless
Agreed. This used to be a
bug about this,
which has been closed by Debtags more than one year ago. We now have much more
useful category data for about
73% of the archive (including
experimental), but what we lack is software using it.
Here's a quick trick to try:
- install debtags, and this gives you
an easy to read text file in
/var/lib/debtags/package-tags.
- from that file, pick packages that have the tags
role::program,
scope::application and interface::x11.
- display the results, and use the tags
works-with::* and use::* to
navigate the results.
There is a
python-debian package in
experimental that has a
debtags module you could play
with.
Why is that that so far noone has written a simple package manager just for
gamers, which uses only the game::* tags?
Do you think Debtags gives you
too many
tags? Then check out:
- The Debtags smart search,
and especially how it does not show you all the tags, but it is able to
infer the tags you want from your google-like query (hi
David!).
- The Debtags tag
editor, and
especially the search-as-you type feature on all the tags and the tag search
(analogous to the Debtags smart
search, but it only searches
tags.
- The Debtags tag cloud, and if you
don't like that one try to make your own: there are countless ways of
generating tag clouds from Debtags data.
To summarise so far, we not only do have better categories, but also a number
of cool algorithms to use them, and some interface prototypes as well. Just
don't expect me to write a package manager as well: that's a job that so far I
decided to leave to someone else.
adept
gave it a try, with positive results.
- there are better keyword search technologies than strstr()
Indeed,
Xapian for example. I use it as part of the
backend of the
Debtags smart
search, and here's our
Xapian-powered normal
keyword based package search
interface which does stemming,
indexing and all you want to ask from a serious full text index.
In that page you don't see all the nice features of
Xapian, but only the ones that I needed for my Debtags
evil plans. Have a look at the
documentation
and give it a try.
Here is a way to see
Xapian's similarity matching in
action:
- go to the Go tagging! page
- click on a random untagged package
- the system gives you a rather relevant selection of tags
- look at it again: the package was untagged: how could the web engine
possibly figure those tags out?
What is happening under the scenes is that:
- I ask Xapian: "what packages are similar to this one?".
- I aggregate the tags of the resulting packages.
- I rank the tags by how many resulting packages have them.
While we are on this topic, why don't we decide that we maintain a Xapian index
of our package descriptions in, for example,
/var/lib/apt/fulltext/, so that
various applications can share it?
- we could use popularity contest data to sort results
Indeed. Anyone would like to implement this
little "popcon"
tool?
Having the data easily accessible locally can encourage people to
use them.
The Debtags
Go tagging! page
already uses
popcon data to show the most common
untagged packages at the top, with double reason: it shows packages that more
people are likely to know (and therefore likely to categorise) and it pushes
for the most common packages to be tagged more urgently.
- it would be cool to do amazon-like things using popcon data
Indeed.
Anyone volunteers to implement a prototype? The full unaggregated (but
anonymised) popcon data are accessible to every Debian Developer on the host
gluck.debian.org in the directory
/org/popcon.debian.org/popcon-mail/all-popcon-results.
Ideally one can do many interesting things with this concept: besides tag
suggestions, one could identify the packages that are most representative of an
installed system, and also offer negative suggestions like: "people who have
packages like yours usually don't have this package: would you like to remove
it?".
There is more than all this that could be done. Recently, almost by accident,
I had the idea of querying packages by example, like
pointing to a
file and find packages that can work with
it. I've asked
Jeroen to have
Mole collect info on all files that could
possibly get installed in
/usr/lib/mime/packages/ (as suggested by
Bernhard
R. Link),
to see if that prototype can be made more accurate.
Query by similarity would be nice: I don't like this program, but what else do
we have that does the same job? This is best implemented using Debtags data,
since it directly maps to semantic properties. Note that you don't have to
show a single tag to the user to implement this kind of interface. Do we have
a way to point at the X window of an application and get the name of the package
that installed it? Wouldn't it be about time to have it?
Why don't we have a system updater utility that shows the
Debian
weather?
Why aren't more people playing with
semantic web?
But more generally, the problem with package managers is that we seem to be
irrationally compulsive in wanting to make the one and only big easy and
complete interface for everyone.
Other more reasonable
people would
tell
you that if
you have two very different kinds of users you may want to consider having two
different user interfaces.
Ubuntu for example installs by default 3 package manager interfaces: Synaptic;
the thing that you access from the application menu to add applications to it;
and the update manager. Does it sound like a waste? To me it makes lots of
sense.
We have lots of interesting, usable metadata; we have algorithms; we have
prototypes; we have ideas for lots of cool, implementable features. The
question is, are we able to write applications that just combines what is
needed from all this treasure to provide the right interface(s) for our
base(s) of users?
Even if my English in 2004 wasn't easy to understand, a read
here might still be useful.
There is so much really cool stuff to be written, just within reach.
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