[gentoo-dev] Portage Organization - A User Perspective

[Damon M. Conway]

I just installed Gentoo, and have been playing with it all day.  Most of my
time on the system has been spent with the Portage system.  I must say that
it is an impressive packaging system, and it works great.  It's why I'm
switching many of my workstations from FreeBSD.

However, I find navigating the tree to be cumbersome and confusing.  For
instance, when I didn't see Pan in net-news, I started trying to make an
ebuild for it since I assumed that it wasn't already in the system.  After
commenting on #gentoo that I was making an ebuild for Pan, I was told that
it's in gnome-apps.  I found that highly confusing.

This model of dependency organization doesn't hold true because galeon is in 
net-www instead of gnome-apps.

Portage seems to have an identity crisis.  It doesn't know if it's a
funcionally organized or dependency organized system.  I can see how
organizing based on kde or gnome can be useful from a development
standpoint.  However, from the perspective of someone using the system it
makes no sense.

Instead of using gnome-apps, gnome-office, and kde-apps, how about making
gnome and kde subdirs under the functionally labeled dirs?  For instance,
pan would move from gnome-apps/pan to net-news/gnome/pan.  That achieves
several things.

1.  It defines a dependency for developers and users
2.  It categorizes based on function for the users
3.  It allows users to pick software for their environment (KDE or GNOME)

BTW, I hope this is seen as constructive criticism.  I really like Gentoo,
and will be converting serveral of my workstations over to it.  It's the
first Linux distro that's felt right, and has a packaging system I like.

my $0.02,
Damon (aka kabau on #gentoo)

--
"UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that 
 would also stop you from doing clever things."  --Doug Gwyn