From: Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@...>
Date: 2003-01-30T08:07:51+09:00
Subject: Re: Can we attack the 'not enough libraries' thing straight on?

On Thursday, January 30, 2003, 2:46:35 AM, ahoward wrote:

> On Wed, 29 Jan 2003, Mark Wilson wrote:

>> If keywords are more formally adopted, perhaps along the lines Gavin has
>> suggested, I would recommend that developers place their keywords in ranked
>> order based on their view of which keywords used are most applicable.  I
>> think this would be helpful because it would provide more information about
>> the developer's perceptions of the scope of their library or application.

> i agree with you here. however, i think that the _users_ should rank
> the keywords (and perhaps many other things)

Good thinking, but it's important not to get ahead of ourselves.  If
the basic feature was introduced (i.e. developers/administrators can
assign keywords and users can search for them), then I think 80% of
the potential will be achieved.

It's important to keep that in mind because it will take a fair bit of
effort by our overstreched RAA representatives to get this done, and
we don't want to complicate the task.

> [...]
> for example, a developer may perceive that there package is good for
> templating pay reports, but users may come along later and find that
> it's templating abilities make it great for cgi/html programing.

I think this case is sufficiently rare to:
a) justify the "80%" judgement above; and
b) be confident that the keyword-set of the package can be "fixed" by
   feedback to the package author

After all, if it were the case, then it would already have the keyword
"template", so it would be found be a reasonably broad keyword search,
which is what people have to be prepared to do under this keyword
regime.  It's inexact but simple and powerful.

Gavin