Re: Tags vs. categories (was: sci-libs/scipy -> dev-python/scip)

Alec Warner wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 8:51 PM, Joe Peterson <lavajoe <at> gentoo.org> wrote:
>> Donnie Berkholz wrote:
>>> I actually object to having crap in dev-python, because things should be
>>> categorized functionally instead of by the language they're implemented
>>> in. 90% of the time you don't care about the language. But category
>>> moves are pretty much pointless, so I don't normally bring it up.
>> Do you mean it is pointless because categories are pointless, or because
>> it is not worth the trouble of doing the move?  I assume we inherited
>> the category idea from fbsd ports.
> 
> It is pointless because we should probably have tags; not categories.
> It is akin to the Section[1] header in a debian control file.
> 
> [1] http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-archive.html#s-subsections

Tags instead of categories . . . Now here's a very interesting idea, 
indeed. Has there ever been a proposal like this for Gentoo?

I think we could improve on the Debian way of doing (sub)sections And I 
  think that a good system of tags would do better than most distros 
which have a fairly limited set of arbitrary categories (like desktop, 
system, utils; who knows what the heck those last two mean, anyway?) But 
blog-style multiple tags might be very, very nice, if we could agree on 
a set of tags to use, without trapping ourselves into some of the 
weirder categorization used by other distros, like Slackware's arcane 
alphabetic system.

Tags . . . I like the idea. I like it a lot. Thoughts? Exciting? Or is 
it an old issue, and I'm 5 years late to the party. :)