review the FamixTag / subtag model ?

[NicolasAnquetil]

currently tags can have sub-tags, but this is not a clear model:

• Does it mean that a sub-tag is a sub concept of a tag ? In this case the sub-tag should only contain entities that its parent tag have (this is not checked)
• Does it mean that a sub-tag is "tagged" by its parent tag ? But what would it mean for tagged entities?

For now, it seems a simple model with categories, tags, and no sub-tags is enough to fulfill many needs.

[jecisc]

Hi,

In the use of tags currently, a subtag is a subconcept of a tag.

If we have a tag Car and a subtag SteeringWheel, if we tag something with SteeringWheel we do not need to tag it with Car also. It should be implicit that if something is tagged with a subconcept, then it is also part of the higher-level concept.

This was useful to split god classes. Maybe it's overkill for other uses.

[NicolasAnquetil]

OK, thanks a lot for reminding this. Do you remember what was exactly the scenario (how it was used to split god class) ? To try to see if we can do the same thing in some other way (see also moosetechnology/FamixTagging#18)

[jecisc]

The concept of nested tags is used to represent composite entities.

For example if we want to rearchitect something to have a package A containing a class B containing a method C but currently in the real code we have only a method C we can create a tag A with a subtag B that tags C.