2011/6/27 Jesús J. Guerrero Botella <jesus.guerrero.botella@...>:
> 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.

2011/6/27 Jesús J. Guerrero Botella <jesus.guerrero.botella@...>:
> 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 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).

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.