Many questions are about the usage of a specific package. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a tag per package? Even cooler, imagine if the author/s of the package got automatically contacted every time someone asked a question about their package. Another advantage I foresee is that it would make it a lot easier and straight forward to ask the simpler questions. Almost like chatting with the original authors. Finally, it would also be useful for posts that are not a question (currently posted here) nor an issue (appropriately posted in github), promoting a discussion about whatever.
As a side note, I only get like 5 tags to choose from whenever I want to tag a Topic. That seems very spartan…
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I just added a tag “hello” to your message – tags can be anything you want.
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It should be noted that you need trust-level TL3 to create a tag. Discourse uses trust levels to dynamically grant rights based on user activity and community interactions.
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I still think that a separate class of “package-tags” would be useful, where package authors would get pinged every time there package gets mentioned.
How do you plan to do that?
I personally lack the skills for that, but I think it could be cool if when registering your package to METADATA you could specify if you want discourse to create a tag for you. Honestly, I’m not sure exactly how it would work, but it seems like all the parts are there? Julia’s package system is completely integrated into github, discourse can ping specific users depending on specific events, both of these have the identities and emails of their users, seems like connecting the different components wouldn’t be impossible. I might be wrong.
In terms of the bigger picture, I’m sure that someone (smarter) had already thought about how to integrate the kind of functionality discourse fulfills (discussion, cross references, links, trust grades, search, etc) into github’s infrastructure. There’s probably a lot of overlap already (with issue reporting). I personally think that both github and discourse do what they do well and should be kept separate (not to mention the advantage of not putting all your eggs into one basket), but this functionality truly lies on the interface between these two things. So it might be problematic.
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Apart from the technical implementation: What problem is solved by package tags? Do you think we get more, quicker or more correct answers with that? When i look around i already see package authors answer questions and contacting package development via github (issues) or direct contact (where provided) is available.
So, i think more information what’s in a post might be helpful (for searching/filtering), but i see no improvement just by specialisation.
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I generally agree with your reservation. But… Searching and filtering is huge. A large part of this forum’s functionality is searching and finding for solutions. So anything that might help that would save a lot of time. Enabling something like: “search for function in Optim.jl” could be very useful. The usability will only increase as the number of topics (posts) and packages increases. On the other hand, this wouldn’t be terribly useful before the number of posts and packages increases…
This might actually be something that @djsegal JuliaObserver might be able to help out with.
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@vchuravy, is this related to:
?
if so, maybe we should wait till after julia con?
otherwise is it just:
- scanning the usage category for bracketed package names
- applying a tag w/ the api (& maybe messaging package’s owner)?
@djsegal I was thinking that we could use julia observer to create tags on discourse automatically. Tags for packages is an orthogonal problem.