Re: [Gimp-developer] Search Action dialog feature

[Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre prokoudine gmail com>]

On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 4:47 PM, peter sikking wrote:

> TITo, as it stands today, is a UI subsystem for which it
> was never decided whether it was a search/help system or
> a command interpreter. trying to be both, it is simply
> substandard at either tasks.
>
> (yes, there is a hard trade-off between the two:
> a search/help system must be compassionate and forgiving,
> mapping a large set of search terms to a range of answers.
> a command interpreter has a tight, _designed_ command set
> whose only goal is to get users as fast a possible to
> one unique command to invoke.)

This actually makes sense.

If [whatever you want to name it] is supposed to be an even simple
search system, it needs to support morphology in every locale we ship
GIMP with. While it's possible to use e.g. hunspell for morphological
analysis and stemming, and its coverage of languages seems OK, it very
well could be an overkill.

If it is supposed to be a _state of the art_ search system, it needs
to go beyond morphology all the way to understanding user's intent,
which is where lists of synonyms become a requirement. A choice of
words heavily depends on user's background. E.g. younger and less
experienced users don't get the way all crop-related functions in GIMP
are translated into Russian, because typically they are not familiar
with photography terminology and expect simpler words.

Alexandre