Re: [gentoo-dev] category ambiguity

[Donnie Berkholz]

On 00:12 Fri 08 Feb     , Marius Mauch wrote:
> On Thu, 7 Feb 2008 12:56:43 -0800
> Donnie Berkholz <dberkholz@g.o> wrote:
>
> > On 15:12 Wed 06 Feb     , Alec Warner wrote:
> > > On 2/4/08, Jonas Bernoulli <jonas@×××××××××.cc> wrote:
> > > > On 2/4/08, Donnie Berkholz <dberkholz@g.o> wrote:
> > > > > On 20:11 Mon 04 Feb     , Jonas Bernoulli wrote:
> > > > > > Thinking about it again I would say tags and categories just
> > > > > > fulfill different purposes. Tags can not replace categories
> > > > > > but might be a useful extension to categories for the tasks I
> > > > > > described, not more not less. They are not better or worse,
> > > > > > just different:)
> > > > >
> > > > > Why don't you think they can replace categories?
> > > >
> > > > Quick answer: Because there are packages with the same name in
> > > > different categories. How would tags deal with that?
> > >
> > > Techincally you could enforce UNIQUE(pkg,[tags]), I agree thats a
> > > poor constraint though ;)
> >
> > I would probably print the ambiguous package name, with info on each
> > package, and a list of tags unique to each that could be used to
> > specify which one you want. Perhaps a numbered list too.
>
> That only works for the user interface, not so good for depend strings,
> config files and pretty much everything else.

I don't think categories are the best way of resolving ambiguities, 
because they don't uniquely identify a package. One could imagine two 
packages in the same category with the same name (for example, two 
Python modules that do drastically different things but would go in 
dev-python).

I'm not sure what the best way is, but I don't think it's categories. 
Perhaps some sort of UUID for packages? You could treat unique tags like 
categories, but those could also be duplicated.

Thanks,
Donnie
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