Re: Adding tags to packages

[Fabio Pesari]

Sorry to bump an old thread but I agree with the OP that tags in
packages would be very helpful, and I can think of at least one use case
in which they might be necessary: games.

While game genre can be put into the description, games right now are
not all in the same .scm files (for example, gnome-mines is in gnome.scm
and not in games.scm).

I've checked out all descriptions and so far you've done a good job of
incorporating game genres into descriptions, but there are some cases in
which that is not enough.

For example, if I search for "board game" then a game like gnubg won't
show up, because only "board" is in its description...but searching for
"board" alone might bring unrelated results like non-board games that
have boards in their description (like Five or More from GNOME, a puzzle
game) or unrelated software like kanban boards.

Also, in other package managers, people are not consistent in their
descriptions and so "RPG" and "role-playing game" and "role playing
game" can all give different results. I think this issue should be
solved by approving each tag, so that they are used carefully (the same
could be said about descriptions right now, but it'd be harder to enforce).

In short, I think tags are a simple solution to a problem that's been
around for many years, and the fact that it wasn't done properly in the
past is purely anecdotal and doesn't mean it can't be done properly now.

Filtering is a very important issue, IMO, and tags are pretty much the
only solution to facilitate it (since categories can be too broad - VLC
and Yoshimi are both audio programs, even if they are completely different).

I propose that tags are implemented, and that each tag has to be
approved by the devs before it is used, and that a list of all tags is
published on the Guix website to help people choose the right tags.