Categories are evil

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Aug 22, 2007, at 11:55, Chris Pickel wrote:

> Personally, I would like to see an "Portdirs" (or some such) file  
> added to ports/, containing a list of dirs to search for for  
> portfiles. The current one would be:
>
> aqua/*
> archivers/*
> audio/*
> ...
> zope/*
>
> and yours would be equivalent to:
>
> a/*/*
> b/*/*
> c/*/*
> ...
> z/*/*
>
> I think the default should be "*/*" for backwards compatibility,  
> but a Portlist of "*" would provide a prefix-less repository as  
> alluded to later in the thread.
>
> What this buys us is:
>  * We can set up deeper hierarchies; there are plenty of python,  
> perl, &c. ports that are basically "a textproc port for python" and  
> these could be in e.g. "python/textproc".
>  * We can exclude, say "groups" and put the PortGroup files there,  
> allowing us to sync the PortGroups with the ports tree.
>  * Users have flexibility to determine their own organization  
> scheme for their personal repositories, including the prefix-less "*".
>
> I'm bringing this up because I think it's a more flexible  
> modification; I don't personally see the need to change the port  
> hierarchy to alphabetical organization. A GUI tool can organize the  
> tree however's appropriate, and when I want to cd to a port's  
> directory, `cd */mpd` works fine if I don't remember it's 'audio'.  
> Under your scheme I'd just switch to `cd **/mpd`.

I don't think anybody needs this level of customization. I don't  
think the current layout of the dports dir is broken, so I wouldn't  
change it.