Categories are evil

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Aug 22, 2007, at 5:34 AM, Randall Wood wrote:
> Well, no, not really. Its just that I think that they are a really  
> bad way to physically organize the ports collection.

why?

> 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.

there's nothing that forces the gui to adopt a display that mirrors  
the physical (on disk) layout of the ports.

The current categories are there so that humans can browse the ports  
directory and see related ports somewhat grouped together.

> 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.

I don't understand what this scheme buys us (other than port  
maintainers not having to choose a place to put a port).

--
Daniel J. Luke
+========================================================+
| *---------------- dluke at geeklair.net ----------------* |
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