| 1 |
I was first going to leave the thread at that, but I am feeling a bit |
| 2 |
graphomanic :). In any case I just wanted to say a few words describing |
| 3 |
"scientific" basis for multi-tier and hierarchies in general. |
| 4 |
|
| 5 |
On Sunday 07 November 2004 15:47, Aron Griffis wrote: |
| 6 |
> George Shapovalov wrote: [Sun Nov 07 2004, 05:12:02PM EST] |
| 7 |
> I don't see how multi-tier categories makes things more findable |
| 8 |
> personally. IMHO it just makes things more buried. I like the |
| 9 |
> two-tier approach we have now: |
| 10 |
|
| 11 |
Some recent philosophical, err :), psychological studies concluded that person |
| 12 |
normally deals best with 7-9 objects simultaneously. Less than that and you |
| 13 |
have to make your "chain of command" unnecessarily deep. More than that and |
| 14 |
you start spending more time searching around or trying to remember what |
| 15 |
every one of these these is about. (Don't remember where I saw it now; my |
| 16 |
wife is a psychologist, that's most likely where :)). |
| 17 |
|
| 18 |
This is essentially the reason why we use hierarchies so widely. If every |
| 19 |
person was able to easily memorise and deal with indefinitely large lists we |
| 20 |
wouldn't be organizing stuff at all, why bother if you can just come in at |
| 21 |
any moment and pick exactly that regularly gray box of standard size in a big |
| 22 |
pile on the floor :). Now, that 7-9 is an average. I believe the deal is that |
| 23 |
every person has some individual "most effective number" but the distribution |
| 24 |
peaks somewhere in that range and is not very wide.. |
| 25 |
|
| 26 |
Incidentally we have exactly 8 major top-level categories ;) : |
| 27 |
app-, dev-, games-, mail-, net-, sys-, www-, x11- |
| 28 |
|
| 29 |
there are also a few which are essentially unitier, where there are only 1 or |
| 30 |
2 second-level's for every unique 1st level, gnustep-* seem to be the largest |
| 31 |
of all, with 3. But then we have a total of 127 categories, which is > |
| 32 |
9x9=81, so we wouldn't be able to follow that rule with two-tier already |
| 33 |
anyway. |
| 34 |
BTW, I don't think we really need to follow that rule for the leaves (I mean |
| 35 |
packages), we can easily stick to 40-50 max for example.. |
| 36 |
|
| 37 |
With that I am going to leave this thread and only post any more if there |
| 38 |
going to be a technicall discussion. |
| 39 |
|
| 40 |
Oh, just one last thing :). I am about to propose yet another split. I think |
| 41 |
some people already know what I imply, but in any case stay tuned :). |
| 42 |
|
| 43 |
George |
| 44 |
|
| 45 |
|
| 46 |
|
| 47 |
-- |
| 48 |
gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list |
Archives