emacs top-level category

[Randall Wood]

On 22 Oct 2007, at 18:26, Juan Manuel Palacios wrote:

> On Oct 22, 2007, at 3:50 AM, Weissmann Markus wrote:
>
> 	I have to admit that I do like your point, willy-nilly categories  
> for every couple of ports that make any sort of sense together is  
> definitely not something we want to encourage. But it's also  
> somewhat difficult to enforce, as there are already categories of  
> that sort (genealogy, containing only two ports; cad, 2; iphone, 4;  
> etc). I chose Perl as an example because of the name prefix thing,  
> but it was a very bad example for the argument of "number of  
> ports", I admit.  I believe that some categories make sense even if  
> they don't hold those many ports, like iphone, but others don't,  
> like genealogy (in this case simply because it's a very small  
> category, holding many ports would definitely make a case for it,  
> in my opinion).
>
> 	So maybe our parameters for creating top-level categories should  
> be a different one(s), rather than plain sheer number of ports in  
> them. "How likely is a user to search in a given category?", that's  
> the question I would ask. I (and any emacs user, I'm sure) would  
> definitely look in dports/emacs/, so that particular category makes  
> sense to me, even if it has only... two to begin with ;-)

I would mark every port as belonging to an emacs category, but would  
not actually create that category. From another email I wrote:

> As I have advocated earlier[1], we should begin thinking about  
> categories not as physical bins to stick ports into (especially  
> since many ports have more than one category listed for the port  
> and there are 30 categories that do not really exist), but as tags  
> in a taxonomy of ports (admittedly a very flat one, but a taxonomy  
> nonetheless) that may or may not assist users in finding that  
> particular port that solves their particular problem.[2]

[1] http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/2007-August/ 
002560.html
[2] http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/2007-October/ 
003197.html

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."