Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: RFC: split up media-sound/ category

[Maciej Mrozowski]

On Saturday 25 of June 2011 19:29:58 Ulrich Mueller wrote:
> >>>>> On Sat, 25 Jun 2011, Maciej Mrozowski wrote:
> > Assuming package names are unique identifiers, tags are not
> > necessary to be available for ebuild.sh so metadata.xml is the best
> > place.
>
> But we know that package names are _not_ unique. There are many cases
> in the Portage tree where two or even more packages have the same
> name. Categories are there to avoid such collisions.

But we also know, that making package names unique is first step to take as I 
already noted in my first post in this thread. It's not that current package 
naming scheme should be an unfixable obstacle preventing us from getting rid 
of pointless categories (yes, every pkgmove in tree renders categories concept 
broken by design, sorry to state this fact brutally).

As far as app-xemacs is concerned (and probably why you commented here), it 
should be sufficient to prepend "xemacs-" to package names from app-xemacs 
category in order to make them distinguished from the rest.
It would be elegant and correct - after all when you "emerge ocaml" you don't 
expect to be installing objective caml mode for Emacs, but ocaml interpreter 
itself.

> With multiple overlays/repositories instead of one monolithic Portage
> tree, the collision issue gets even worse if you have a flat
> namespace.

Every not Gentoo-based distro can live with unique package names, somehow 
Gentoo is not able to? Colour me surprised.

Btw, in above, I specifically proposed those unique packages to be placed in 
${PORTDIR}/ebuilds/ because when 'ebuilds' is considered like a fake category' 
- existing atom syntax can be used and so can be current package manager 
implementation (even with not entirely converted package tree, except 
uniqueness is not checked in such case).

-- 
regards
MM