Massive Tag Removal in Launchpad

[Bryce Harrington]

On Mon, Dec 03, 2007 at 07:51:23AM +0100, Martin Pitt wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Cesare Tirabassi [2007-12-02 15:28 +0100]:
> > Would it makes sense to have two tags categories?
> > 
> > "Official" tags would only be defined by a restricted choosen set of people. I 
> > expect these to include, as Martin said, motu-verification-needed, packaging, 
> > bitesize, desktop etc. etc.
> > They would deserve a "drop down" menu of their own for quick searching.
> > This would leave the freedom to others to define and use tags for their own 
> > needs (I have seen them used for instance by people to tag their own work).
> 
> I think that's a fine idea. So everyone can use tags at will, and some
> are especially blessed. That's very little bureaucracy.

In migrating Inkscape over from SourceForge, we've also run into some
usability issues with tags.  We've got about 60-70 tags.  Some of the
questions/suggestions made might also be of general interest for Ubuntu
too:

a.  Auto-completion of tag names.  When entering tags, currently it's
    not very intuitive to find what tags are already in use.
    Autocompletion or a search list might encourage tag-reuse and help
    avoid typos, etc.  Or perhaps checkboxes for the most popular or
    most recently used tags.

b.  Partial tag matches to support tag hierarchies.  Currently
    search-by-tag returns bugs that match exactly.  If we could search
    by partial matches like "platform*" to match tags like
    "platform-x86" "platform-amd64", then it would encourage more
    organized tag name selection, and avoid the need for catchall tags
    like "platform-all".

c.  Tag merging or removal.  It would be nice to have a way to list tags
    by age of last use, sorted by number of (open|all) bugs with the
    tag, and a method to remove the tags or merge them into another tag
    (or maybe via the email interface).  This would probably go a long
    way towards solving the "dead tag" problem.

I've encouraged the people with the above ideas to file bugs in
launchpad for these ideas.

(Btw, the Inkscape migration to Launchpad has gone fairly well.  Not
surprisingly, most everyone that's used it is finding it to be a huge
upgrade, and we're sharing tips and ideas.  We only had two protestors -
both Fedora users feeling Launchpad was "Ubuntu-specific"; neither had
very convincing arguments though.)

Bryce