Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: New category proposal

[Georgi Georgiev]

maillog: 10/05/2005-22:30:56(-0500): Brian Harring types
> Re: having a package claimed by multiple categories... eh.  yeah,
> that's a bit valid although I'd think it's either A) an indiciation
> our categories need to be adjusted a bit, or B) (hopefully) a rare
> case. :)

No, no, please not A). 8-O

As to whether the categories are good or not... think about it. If they
were good, would we still be seeing packages moving around the tree?
That's why I think that multiple categories are a necessity. Unless of
course, packages stop getting moved around and Gentoo can gurantee that
all packages will stay at their current location.

What about the Mozilla suite. What in the world is it doing in
www-client? After all, the Mozilla suite is
- a www browser (www-client)
- a mail client (mail-client)
- a calendar
- an html composer
- an irc client (net-irc)

Might as well go to net-misc :-/

My personal reasons to start the topic about the flat tree:

- I hate the moves of packages between categories which causes enough
  problems as it is. I also find the arguments of where to put what
  pointless. Who cares if it is mail-client/mutt or net-mail/mutt as
  long as it stays in one place and is accessible by its name "mutt". If
  you think that mail-client is more descriptive than net-mail, then add
  "keywords" (for those who hate the idea of multiple categories) to the
  metadata of each package and let emerge -s search by keyword. Does
  "mutt" not belong to net-mail? It does, but mail-client is better.
  Still, that is no reason to remove its relation to "net-mail".  Cache
  the keyword information to make the search as fast as possible and
  you're done with the searchability part. You can now safely forget
  about this thing called "categories" as they become irrelevant, and
  hopefully never move another package.

- I also hate being unable to find exactly the package that I need right
  away. I want to check mutt's ebuild... cd /usr/portage/... what next?
  Is it at the same place that I remember it was the last time I
  checked? Do I *have* to know what category it belongs to? Of course I
  can do "cd /usr/portage/*/mutt", but shell completion on the mutt part
  won't work on this one. Mutt's not quite the example for the necessity
  of completions, but it gets worse with longer names like
  mozilla-firefox-bin.

- Personal overlays. I think this a point that's clear enough. Gentoo
  devs may have scripts that keep the tree in sync after the
  loved-by-all move of a package, but that doesn't apply to us, mere
  mortals.

Disclaimer: I did not intend to be offensive even if at times I seem to.
I was not being sarcastic either.

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