[pmwiki-users] RFC: Indexing categories and links (suspended)

[Hans]

Friday, March 5, 2010, 9:06:45 PM, Petko Yotov wrote:

> While there are users from the community who want this feature, I'm not sure
> we have a consensus, ot even a majority. The implementation requires 
> substantial changes to the core and I feel that what we have now is not really
> a good, globally logical solution. Also, a couple of bugs need to be fixed and
> released asap.

> For these reasons, I'll suspend the feature request (PITS:00447) until we find
> a better way to deal with it.

Thanks. I find this whole discussion confusing, both in content as in
the way it is conducted. I see only now that the discussion has
spilled into a PITS entry http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PITS/00447

Contentwise it confused me because I did not grasp what the problem
was, nor the proposed way to soplve it.

Why would one want [[!Name]] and [[Category/Name]] to have different
meaning? Both are links to the same page (which may or may not
exists, but this is a different potentially confusing issue for a
newcomer to grasp the use of categories in PmWiki).

Petko writes in the original post:

> Category links are stored in a special attribute in the page file, and also in
> a special file .pageindex to speed up the searches, in the form "Category.Name
> Category.Name2" etc.

I don't see that. I only see a targets= attribute, which will list
all link targets in the page, including links to Category pages.
Category links are not treated different than other links,
and categories exists as pages (even though they may not exists, but
only virtually). This is the core idea. I do not see the distinction
between declaring a category and referencing to a category page.
We are using link markup, so are referencing to another page.
We are not declaring category attributes to a page.

Unless one wants to change this, I see no reason for this whole
discussion.

We could have a different markup to declare categories, then save
these categoriesd in a categories= page atribute, and not under
targets= links. Then expand pagelist accordingly with a categories=
parameter.

As to expanding category functionality:
I found the tagger recipe most useful for this.
http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/Tagger

To expand pagelist so it can list pages belonging to both category A
and category B (logical filtering) etc. is more important IMHO than
to treat backlinks differently according to some prefixes.

As to exclamation mark usage in pagelist:
even though it may not be used widely, it still has solid meaning as
a negater, and I would not dismis it lighly in favour of its use as
Category group alias. Obviously the design fault was in the use of an
exclamation mark in [[!Name]] link markup shortcuts.
But if we leave the equivalence of links [[!Name]] and
[[Category/Name]] intact, and add a new markup to declare a dedicated
category page attribute, the exclamation mark won't be a problem.

Anyway, those are my not very qualified musings....

  ~Hans