Categories are evil

[Randall Wood]

Well, no, not really. Its just that I think that they are a really  
bad way to physically organize the ports collection.

I understand that categories are an important and useful tool for  
organizing and grouping ports, but when thinking about a GUI for the  
MacPorts system, I realized that categories should best be thought of  
as a set of semi-standardized keywords which any mechanism for  
searching for ports should recognize. I have also been long bugged by  
the need to decide which category is the primary category for a port  
when placing it in the ports collection.

I understand the rational for Juan's desire to move the ports tree  
out of trunk, and would like to suggest that when (if) that happens,  
that the structure of the ports collection should, at the same time,  
change from collection/category/port to collection/a/ab/port, where  
'a' is any lowercase alphanumeric character and 'ab' is a combination  
of any two lowercase alphanumeric characters, and that any port in  
directory a/ab should start with the characters ab.

I understand that some directories under the proposed scheme may be  
large, such as /p/p5, /p/py, /g/gn but it seems that this would not  
be any real change from the current situation for the perl, python,  
devel, and other directories that exist now.

There is a ticket with a patch to support building this style port  
collection at https://svn.macosforge.org/projects/macports/ticket/12542

I apologize for the early morning rambling...

Randall Wood
rhwood at mac.com
http://shyramblings.blogspot.com

"The rules are simple: The ball is round. The game lasts 90 minutes.  
All the
rest is just philosophy."