Re: [gentoo-dev] ekeyword and ordering

[foser]

On Fri, 2005-06-10 at 12:33 -0400, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> consistency is one advantage (which i'm sure you'll say is pointless)

I've been the one talking consistency, something you've knowingly broken
for a long time here.

> as for the rest of the ramble you posted here it's really quite wrong ... you
> must have missed the class where they teach you the ins & outs of
> alphabetical sorting because it really does allow you to quickly scan a list
> and figure out if the item you're looking for is there or not

First of all this is speculative and may not apply to this particular
situation to begin with. 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. 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. 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.
	I think you are just going out of your way to justify something you've
done for ages for no other reason than your own preference. But I must
grant you, you come with better arguments now than you've ever done in
the past concerning this issue. Of course you had a lot of time to think
about it.

> if you ever had to do arch-specific KEYWORDing on a frequent basis (and i'm
> 99% sure you have nfc we support other arches than x86 if we use
> arch-specific breakage in GNOME depends as any sort of track record),

If there was ever arch specific breakage -this btw is a baseless claim,
so it shouldn't have been put up here, but I guess that's what populism
is about-, then it is most likely because someone screwed up the
ordering inside one package dir, making it inconsistent and as such a
pain to deal with.
	Now for my list of 3 letter IRC abbreviations to make a point : wtf,
wth, imo, lol, nfw, fyi, otw. Keep it clean.

>  you'd
> know that scattered KEYWORDS is a pita to deal with ... i've seen cases where
> a specific arch was duplicated in KEYWORDS; once near the beginning and once
> near the end ... normally it wasnt anything bad, but there was a case where
> one KEYWORD was stable while the other was unstable

Again something I'd only expect to happen in cases where someone is
reordering keywords at will inside a package.

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.

Anyway, my feud is with the inconsistency within packages and how it got
introduced, not with whatever order is preferred by some. Now tell me
how this happened again?

- foser