Re: Adding tags to packages

[Ludovic Courtès]

John Darrington <address@hidden> skribis:

> Looking at other operating systems / package managers which do this, it
> has never really been a success.  Trying to predict what tags the user 
> is going to search for is  - well like trying to read the mind of
> someone you've not yet met.

Agreed.  Several years ago, I was pleased when debtags came along.  But
let’s face it: People are used to just typing random keywords in a box,
rather than having to think about the syntax and semantics of tags, and
finding the right tags to look for.

I think ‘guix package --search’ works OK for the general case,
esp. since its output can be piped to recutils or grep if you really
want to filter the search results.

Now, I understand that an operation like listing all bioinfo packages is
not that simple.  Currently it can be achieved by filtering based on the
‘location’ field:

  guix package -s . | recsel -p name -e 'location ~ "bioinformatics"'

But then again the same goes for “listing all the PDF readers”, etc.

WDYT?

Ludo’.