Dear, I am lacking imagination and I need your help for: - what should be the query you type, - then what is the package you expect with such query, in order.
Example: guix search source control management # expect: git, mercurial, svn, then other guix search r cytometry # expect: r-flowcore r-flowsom then other Using your imagination, I can benchmark some ranking functions. As reported, the experience with "guix search" is sometimes poor. Aside the issue of pager or output format, there is 2 explorations for improvements discussed in this bug report [1]: faster and more accurate. The benchmark for "faster" is straightforward and the exploration is on going. :-) Currently, the packages are ranked accordingly to 'relevance'. There is good, bad and ugly about this strategy and the state-of-art Okapi BM25 ranking function has to be evaluated to know if such information retrieval strategy is worth or not for search of packages. Well, thanks to Arun guile-xapian bindings, the BM25 ranking is easy to benchmark since all the tough work is relayed to Xapian. [1] http://issues.guix.gnu.org/39258 >From my point of view, such pair (query terms, expected packages) would help to improve the tools: - maybe "guix search" - maybe "guix lint" by establishing some metrics indicating is the synopsis and description are relevant -- compared to all the other packages. Thank you in advance for help me in the exploration of such ideas. Best regards, simon
