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

[Patrick Lauer]

On 06/25/11 21:42, Maciej Mrozowski wrote:
> 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).

I disagree. If I put postgresql in x11-libs that's just wrong, and then
you fix it with a package move. Doesn't mean the category system is
broken, just means that it was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

>
> 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.

Please don't do that. It leads to the kind of funny package names that
some legacy distros carry around, which make it exquisitely hard to
guess what their intent is.

Right now "emerge openoffice" does what I want. Don't change that to
"openoffice-core-core" or other aneurisms that can be found in the wild.
Do not try to make me do extra work, that's rude and inconsiderate :)

>
>> 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.

Most other distros also live without the option of downgrades, without a
working package search infrastructure and without working init scripts.
Do we want to define ourselves through the features we don't have?!

And actually we do have unique package names, just that we don't
obfuscate with random distractions but with a mostly working category
system. So think what you are trying to fix, and no, XML is not the
answer :)

>
> 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).
>
How about we remove slots too, that's only confusing, so you get a
distinct unique package postgres-8.3, postgres-8.4, postgres-9.0 - and a
meta package "postgres" that depends on any of those. As an upside we
roughly double the amount of packages we have, and our dependencies get
so much more ... OMG ... nooo ... what a nightmare.

So again, what are you trying to fix, and what makes you think it was
broken to start with?

-- 
Patrick Lauer         http://service.gentooexperimental.org

Gentoo Council Member and Evangelist
Part of Gentoo Benchmarks, Forensics, PostgreSQL, KDE herds