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

[Kent Fredric]

On 26 June 2011 21:53, Patrick Lauer <patrick@g.o> wrote:
>
> 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 :)
>
>>
> 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 :)
>

I have to agree for the most part, I mean, ultimately were' going to
have a bit of "convention" for the sake of convenience.

If you want to see what a flat portage system would look like, just do
ls /usr/bin/

A lot of thing that are perl modules will inevitably, in a flat
topology, be prefixed with "perl-" , like so many other distros do (
and its ugly ,  debian's   liblocal-libperl  for local::lib is an
example of this catastrophe )

Why do we need to devine a /new/ convention for giving packages a
unique name when we have one that is *presently* working just fine. (
for the purpose of uniquely defining a package that is, its failing in
a few places for reasons related to discoverability, but I'm no longer
arguing that ).

the difference between

dev-perl-local-lib

and

dev-perl/local-lib

is really not that big in practice, but one sucks infinitely more than
the other.

With this "new" system however, pkgmoves will be a thing of the past,
even if we keep the legacy category system around.

pkgmoves take place in my understanding, largely because the category
they're in makes them proves hard to find for discoverability
purposes.

In the new system, categories are no longer part of the discovery
system, and exist soley as a method to keep the files organised with
distinct names.

ie: Currently, were' proposing moving some things around  , splitting
media-sound into several sub categories, ie:

sound-players (and maybe sound-radio)
sound-editors
sound-plugins
sound-libs

"Flattening" does not in any way solve this issue in the least,
because in the case of a flattening, the difference would be primarily
that you have a load of packages with unuseful prefixes instead of a
directory, so you'd be doing

pkgmove media-sound-amarok   sound-players-amarok

and you would still have to go and update all the dependencies etc.

And I think you'll agree that that sounds a little daft.

So in the new system, you put a package in a category that makes some
degree of sense, and then leave it there, for all eternity, and rely
on tags to make them discoverable instead of moving things around or
renaming them.

> 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 :)

I'd hope that with a new tag based system, you could "emerge
openoffice" and get told "Yeah, I know that once upon a time there was
only 1 openoffice, but now there's more than one, did you mean
openoffice-org or libreoffice?"

Same goes for the various forms of virtualbox ( did you mean
virtualbox from source, virtualbox binary, the opensource edition or
the commercial edition etc )  java ( did you mean 'sun-jdk?
blackdown-jdk? '  etc )  flash ( did you mean adobe-flash? ) xine (
did you mean xine-ui or xine-lib? , or perhaps even gxine ? )  and a
host of other things that are presently like this.



-- 
Kent

perl -e  "print substr( \"edrgmaM  SPA NOcomil.ic\\@tfrken\", \$_ * 3,
3 ) for ( 9,8,0,7,1,6,5,4,3,2 );"

http://kent-fredric.fox.geek.nz