1 |
On Sun, Jun 26, 2011 at 5:53 AM, Patrick Lauer <patrick@g.o> wrote: |
2 |
> So again, what are you trying to fix, and what makes you think it was |
3 |
> broken to start with? |
4 |
|
5 |
Well, I think there are things worth improving. However, I'm not sure |
6 |
that we should consider implementation of tagging a reason to |
7 |
re-design the entire portage system. |
8 |
|
9 |
I think the simplest way to go about tagging is to just stick tags in |
10 |
metadata.xml and not change the way anything else works fundamentally. |
11 |
I could see a little room for allowing for future expansion, such as |
12 |
defining namespaces in the xml. Then you could have a set of |
13 |
description tags, and later a set of file tags (a la portage file |
14 |
search). |
15 |
|
16 |
Lack of tools to do something with the tags isn't a problem - they'll |
17 |
happen. Probably the first place to do something with tags would be |
18 |
packages.gentoo.org - if I want a quick list of all the text editors |
19 |
on the system I don't mind doing a quick web search. |
20 |
|
21 |
Sure, we can later expand things to provide a metadata index of some |
22 |
kind and then command-line tools to search tags, or maybe a program |
23 |
that sets up a tree full of symlinks or whatever after doing a sync. |
24 |
I don't see why these have to be fully worked out to implement the |
25 |
concept. |
26 |
|
27 |
I think we should avoid changing the fundamental design of portage, |
28 |
such as removing categories or allowing tags to be used as |
29 |
dependencies/etc. At least, not right now. If we set up namespaces |
30 |
for tags that might allow for such a thing in the future. |
31 |
|
32 |
Also, there is no reason that tools couldn't help maintain the tags - |
33 |
certainly if we used a tag namespace to list the files installed by a |
34 |
package we'd want to automate that. I don't think we should try to |
35 |
tackle that out of the gates - for starters the list is |
36 |
version-specific and not package-specific, so you'd either need to |
37 |
figure out how to sanely build and maintain a union of everything, or |
38 |
tag tags with package versions or something. |
39 |
|
40 |
The main driver behind tags seems to be searchability, and I think |
41 |
that is something we could easily improve. I don't think we should |
42 |
hold that up over an initiative to completely re-architect Gentoo... |
43 |
|
44 |
Rich |