Categories are evil

[Landon Fuller]

On Aug 22, 2007, at 07:13, Daniel J. Luke wrote:

> 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.

Indeed. Why complicate things with weird sub-directories? If you  
really don't want an on-disk port heirarchy (understandable), then we  
could just stick them all in one directory. It's a flat namespace,  
after all.
Honestly, though, this sounds like more change for the sake of  
change. Is there a technical advantage to changing the implementation?

-landonf
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