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Re: Improving browsing and discoverability in the Packages Menu


From: Eric Abrahamsen
Subject: Re: Improving browsing and discoverability in the Packages Menu
Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2015 16:38:30 +0800
User-agent: Gnus/5.130012 (Ma Gnus v0.12) Emacs/25.0.50 (gnu/linux)

Drew Adams <address@hidden> writes:

>> This would be nice to fix. `finder-known-keywords' looks like the
>> place to start. Package filtering is only indirectly connected to the
>> value of that variable, though.
>> 
>> Filtering is done on keywords actually found in the packages. If
>> package authors used `auto-insert' when creating their packages,
>> they would be prompted to add keywords from `finder-known-keywords'.
>> That leaves a lot of wiggle room for the insertion of random keywords.
>
> I'm not sure what you meant by the last part, so this comment might
> be unrelated to your post.  But I would like to remind us all that
> `finder' functionality is not limited to the keywords found in
> `finder-known-keywords'.
>
> Users can use any keywords they like in their library headers.
> I would not like to see `finder.el' gravitate toward imposing some
> particular set of keywords or expecting only some particular set.
>
>> In order to make filtering useful, it seems like it would be
>> worthwhile fleshing out the taxonomy of `finder-known-keywords',
>> and enforcing it -- ie, keywords not in that variable would be
>> ignored by package filtering.
>
> I'm not sure I would object to something like that being done only
> "by package filtering".  But I would object to changing the point
> of `finder.el' so that it generally becomes more rigid in that way.
>
> Even for only "package filtering", I have the question of why.
> Why should package filtering be limited to some predefined list
> of keywords?  Just why should "keywords not in that variable...
> be ignored by package filtering"?

You're right, "enforcing" anything is probably a bad idea. But looking
at the lists presented to you when filtering packages (or when doing an
auto-insert in a new elisp file), it looks a lot like tag-rot: a whole
lot of random overlapping categories and mis-matched types. I guess I
agree that package authors should be able to put anything they want in
the Keyword header. On the other hand, I want to be able to search for
packages related to sending email messages from Emacs (for instance),
and know that I'm not missing packages because their author tagged them
as "email" instead of "mail". That sort of thing just makes the whole
process feel broken.

Maybe just expand the canonical list of curated keywords, then let
package authors add their own on top of that?

Eric




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