Search improvements (Was: Opposition to new single-letter package name "t")

[Taylan Kammer]

On 09.03.2021 12:38, Tobias Geerinckx-Rice wrote:
> Raghav Gururajan 写道：
>> Since, we already mention "todo list manager" in description, I think
>> "ti-cli" is better.
> 
> It says nothing about the package and does not uniquely identify it:
> 
>  bundlerApp {
>    pname = "t";
>    [...]
> 
>    meta = with lib; {
>      description = "A command-line power tool for Twitter";
>      homepage    = "http://sferik.github.io/t/";;
>      [...]
>    };
>  }
> 
> It's “t”!  It's “CLI”!  It's... a totally different package[0]!
> 
> Please: t-todo-manager (t-todo-whatever, I don't care) or
> $something_a_mainstream_distro_uses, but not yet another bikeshedded
> unique name, fun as they are to do.
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> T G-R
> 
> [0]:
> https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/release-20.09/pkgs/tools/misc/t/default.nix
> 

I agree that t-todo-manager is the superior choice.  (With a secondary
preference for "t-todo-list-manager".)

This discussion made me realize that "guix search" might benefit from
the following improvement though:  I think the relevance score for a
search result should be increased significantly if the searched word is
a standalone (not substring) part of a package's name when the name is
split into dash-separated words.

For instance, the package "emacs-hl-todo" should get a much higher score
than "emacs-mastodon" when searching for "todo".  Currently the Mastodon
one has score 11 and the todo one only 9.

The same thing goes for the synopsis and description of the package, but
with respectively lower increases to the score.  (I.e. name > synopsis >
description.)

Handling of plurals like "todos" instead of "todo" would also be great
but could be left to a later step.

Any thoughts about / objections to this idea?  To be honest I haven't
checked if there's maybe already a bug report about this.


- Taylan