Re: [gentoo-dev] ekeyword and ordering

[Aron Griffis]

Catching up on your inbox, foser? ;-)

foser wrote:	[Mon Aug 01 2005, 01:06:10PM EDT]
> On Sat, 2005-06-11 at 14:46 -0400, Aron Griffis wrote:
> > foser wrote:	[Sat Jun 11 2005, 04:15:22AM EDT]
> > > Arch keywords are concepts and as such may not primarily be dealt as
> > > a an alphabetical list but as words in a sentence, there is no abc
> > > order in sentences.
> >
> > Foser, no offense intended, but you started out in this thread making
> > a couple good points.  However this is completely off the wall.  The
> > KEYWORDS list isn't a sentence.
>
> The post I replied to was full of far-fetched reasoning, I just made a
> similar post.

Actually, later I thought maybe I understood your sentence parallel.
Your point was that when the KEYWORDS list is scrambled from its
original order, it loses information, similar to when the words in
a sentence are scrambled.  Sorry, I should have been more open-minded
in my first reading.

> > > If you have to search, you'll have
> > > to scan anyway, exact position is not a guarantee for certainty because
> > > not every pack is available on every arch, it's not like you can go
> > > without scanning.
> >
> > Doesn't change the point that scanning in alpha order is easier than
> > scanning append order.
> >
> > > Last, this only holds to some extent true for people
> > > in countries with alphabetic scripts, outside that limited part of the
> > > globe people are not as proficient in ordering alphabetically.
> >
> > AFAIK, all Gentoo developers are fluent English speakers, even if for
> > some it isn't their first language.
>
> Fluent, right. Try some of the cjk people. Not really. Anyway, it
> doesn't matter, if you didn't grown up with the alphabet, you really
> don't know the ordering by heart like western people do. In spoken
> language it doesn't matter what the order is, it is totally
> arbitrary.  Also, realistically it's probably only 1st language for
> maybe half of the devs these days.

IMHO (and I do mean humble, because I could be wrong) the majority of
portage tree commits are coming from people who are fluent in
a Western tongue.  For many people the alpha ordering makes things
easier, and most of the others don't care.

> > > A certain amount of uncertainty in order actually might prove to be
> > > effective in having everyone who deals with keywords actually really
> > > check all keywords and not depend on assumptions, which both 'error'
> > > cases you mention seem to be caused by.
> >
> > Maintaining a behavior that encourages mistakes, in hopes that the
> > extra effort required will prevent those mistakes?  This cannot
> > possibly be a good approach...
>
> You assume here suddenly that it encourages mistakes, there is no
> such evidence presented here or ever was, there is however evidence
> to the contrary where the continues shifting of orders (within
> packages) caused problems (the thing I disliked about this whole
> situation to begin with). I actually suggest that the opposite might
> be true, a certain degree of uncertainty (between packages) prompts
> caution and might prove to be more error-free. Sure it's all a bit
> far fetched, but so was the post that suggested that there was some
> grand ergonomic idea behind this arbitrary change.

You're right, I don't have evidence to present.  My suspicion is that
uncertainty doesn't lead to caution in this case.  I didn't intend to
make any more assumptions than you were making.

> I did not in this thread challenge the ordering (who made that up?),
> I challenged the way it got 'introduced'. I just got ticked off by
> the 'scientific basis' that suddenly was presented as the big reason
> behind it.
>
> To recap, it was the arbitrary /ordering change/ of a select group
> of individuals that created problems within packages, not the one or
> the other /order/.

Oh, I thought for sure that you were arguing that one order was better
than the other.  If you weren't, why have you talked so much about it?
It seems like if you don't care about the ultimate ordering, then it
would be better to ignore that part of this thread, wouldn't it?

Regarding the way the change was made, I apologized at the beginning
of this thread and stated that I would not make a future change like
that without going through a discussion first.  As the maintainer of
ekeyword, I made the change unilaterally without taking into account
how controversial it would be.  It seems like the thread could have
ended there, eh?

Regards,
Aron

--
Aron Griffis
Gentoo Linux Developer