Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC GLEP 1005: Package Tags

[yac]

On Fri, 28 Mar 2014 20:02:30 +0000
Ciaran McCreesh <ciaran.mccreesh@××××××××××.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 28 Mar 2014 15:46:49 -0400
> Wyatt Epp <wyatt.epp@×××××.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 1:14 PM, Ciaran McCreesh
> > <ciaran.mccreesh@××××××××××.com> wrote:
> > > On Thu, 27 Mar 2014 03:53:47 +0100
> > > yac <yac@g.o> wrote:
> > >> What I was describing is the difference between fundamental
> > >> properties of categories and tags.
> > >
> > > You are trying to redefine categories in terms of a concept that
> > > they didn't originally represent.
> >
> > No one's redefining anything.  You seem awfully fixated on the
> > history that forced categories to exist, which doesn't really
> > matter in this context.  Regardless of any of that, people can and
> > _do_ attempt to use categories as a rudimentary method of
> > attempting to search for packages.
>
> "Giving something a unique unambiguous name" is not a historical
> issue. It's something we still need, and a core part of how package
> manglers work. You can't just pretend that categories there for
> exactly this.

I see your point. Resolving ambiguity is certainly needed and
categories are prettier than most distributions approach like prefixing
the package name with "python-".

However, it still seems that besides resolving ambiguity categories are
in part also used to provide information better expressed with tags,
like the genre of a game.

jcallen was kind enough to provide a script that finds ambiguous
package names and prints them with the categories they are in [1]_ and
the output for portage tree [2]_, which supports my suspicion that
there indeed are no ambiguities in game names. Maybe more cases like
this can be found.

.. [1] http://bpaste.net/show/VuEHVqLlLgsfsdL71tuz/
.. [2] http://bpaste.net/show/195029/

---
Jan Matějka        | Developer
https://gentoo.org | Gentoo Linux
GPG: A33E F5BC A9F6 DAFD 2021  6FB6 3EBF D45B EEB6 CA8B