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List:       gentoo-desktop
Subject:    Re: [gentoo-desktop] Desktop Restructuring
From:       Dan Armak <danarmak () gentoo ! org>
Date:       2003-12-12 21:47:30
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On Friday 12 December 2003 21:02, James Marsh wrote:
> * Alastair Tse <liquidx@gentoo.org> [12-Dec-2003 18:00]:
> > I would not advocate using USE flags for that purpose. There could be
> > an explosion of USE flags if it was used for searching purposes. It
> > is probably best to do that outside of the ebuild or the portage
> > hierarchy. Possibly the best place would be in metadata.xml, this is
> > exactly metadata.
>
> Absolutely - consistently used keyword metadata would be the best
> solution, so long as it is indexed in such a way that it is fast to
> search.

Agreed.

I also think in the mid-term future reorganization of packages is going to 
become more active in gentoo. We now have more than enough packages and users 
to make this really necessary. In the (admittedly few) cases in recent months 
where I had to look for a package that did X, categories proved of little 
use.

Current portage categories would be relatively hard and non-BC to change 
enough to make them really useful for categorizing stuff. These suggestions 
have floated up at various times:
- packages appearing in multiple categories
- more than our 1/2 category levels + 'removable' levels*
- classification/viewing + filtering by different principles (category [like 
now], toolkit [console/xlib/kde/gnome...], alphabetical, license...)
- keyword-based searching (and classification?)
- our current DESCRIPTIONs are a) not always there, b) not always informative, 
and c) sometimes can only be understood if you're reasonably familiar with 
what they're talking about.

metadata.xml is the best (currently the only) place for any and all data this 
requires as I see it. Then (especially in the highly modular portage-ng) 
different frontends from emerge to GUI tools can present all this stuff in 
different ways.

Of course I don't mean we should do all of the above :-) This is after all 
just about looking for a package (with many existing non-distro-dependant 
tools), not about installing or using it. So while I enjoy thinking about it, 
I don't know how much time I'd put into it (instead of other Gentoo stuff 
that is ;-). So, I'll stop here.

(*) I use that to mean a level of classification you can remove from a tree, 
making all its children the children of its parent, to enable finer/coarser 
categorization. So that a/b/foo, a/b/bar, a/c/baz becomes a/foo, a/bar, 
a/baz.

-- 
Dan Armak
Gentoo Linux developer (KDE)
Matan, Israel
Public GPG key: http://dev.gentoo.org/~danarmak/danarmak-gpg-public.key
Fingerprint: DD70 DBF9 E3D4 6CB9 2FDD  0069 508D 9143 8D5F 8951

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