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

[Jesús J. Guerrero Botella]

2011/6/27 Wyatt Epp <wyatt.epp@×××××.com>:
> 2011/6/27 Jesús J. Guerrero Botella <jesus.guerrero.botella@×××××.com>:
>> That still doesn't answer my question anyway: both features (symlinks
>> and +65k files on a single dir) are incompatible with fat32. And
>> someone said fat32 compatibility is a feature we want (still can't
>> guess why, but well, be consequent...). Obviously, we want fat32
>> compatibility when it comes to arguing against symlinks, which have
>> always been with us by the way, but that's not important when we talk
>> about other things that are not compatible with fat32.
>
> I'm not sure where you're getting 65k files.  Unless I misinterpreted
> everything everyone else was saying, every package would still have
> its own directory.  There are fewer than 20k even with a bunch of
> overlays installed.  Regardless, you might check the other (other)
> thread; I think we're probably going to go quick and
> not-necessarily-dirty with sets to get 99% of what we're looking for
> almost trivially.

Well, someone suggested a flat directory, which I understand as having
all the ebuilds in a single directory, that's also why they are
talking about the need to make ebuild names unique, to avoid file
names collision.

> 2011/6/27 Jesús J. Guerrero Botella <jesus.guerrero.botella@×××××.com>:
>> C) "ls $PORTDIR/whatever-category" is a command that's way simpler
>> than the one you posted.
>>
> It's also fundamentally broken because one package can only be in one
> category and their expansion has not historically been speedy.  Tags
> are a non-exclusive one-to-many relationship.  So a package can have
> as many tags as it needs, and users will be able to leverage tags
> alone or in combinations to find things they want or need.

I wouldn't call that broken. Again, symlinks can perfectly solve that
with little extra work. We use them for that same purpose in lots of
things. For example, eselect sets symlinks to select the active mesa
implementation from between all the installed ones. And we have been
using symlinks to make libs and paths available with different names
in linux fs's since ever.

I am not saying that my idea is better than the rest. I am just
wondering why the heck symlinks are not an option when linux has
supported them natively since almost the day zero.

>> I don't even use tags for my music collections
>
> That's very curious, and I wouldn't mind talking about why that is
> off-list (not quite joking; that's really interesting).

Feel free to mail me if you want extra clarification. But to sum up, I
just keep everything in a estructured directory tree. I could easily
use easytag to automatically tag everything with little or not extra
effort, automatically, but I rarely resort to tags. I don't use
behemoths like amarok or the likes. I use mplayer or moc, usually. And
locate is the only tool I need to find quickly a song in less than one
second.

> So to sum it up, we're fixing package navigation and discovery because
> Gentoo is about choice.  Even 15,000 packages is too many to have to
> play "guess the category", and it's cruel to expect users (including
> ourselves) to know everything in the tree at all times.  It's in all
> our best interest to make it easy to know what choices are available
> so we can get back to more important things.  Tags help further this
> ideal.

That's fine by me, as long as some sense is retained in the underlying
fs estructure and tags are an added value, not a substitute for what's
already in there. What I wouldn't like is to get 140k ebuilds dumped
into a single directory.


-- 
Jesús Guerrero Botella