On Thu, 2006-07-20 at 13:24 -0700, Brian Harring wrote: > Not much experience then. Your use scenario above is "I'm looking > for a package", not "I'm trying to find packages in category x". > > Of course categories don't matter to you in your case- you're not > *using* them. What others are talking about how ever is folks who > *are* using categories- say to see if any new packages were added to > games-strategy.
Actually, this is a perfect example of categories working properly. After all, if you like to play the occasional RPG, then games-rpg would be where you'd want to look. Sure, some of them are graphical and require X, meaning they *could* be in x11-apps, but that isn't what most people would consider them first. That being said, if you were wanting, say, Neverwinter Nights (nwn), then it is possible you wouldn't know which category it resides in, and need to search for it. However, saying that categories in portage are poorly implemented is pretty much downplaying their usefulness. If someone told me there's a bug in ipw2200, I might not know what that would be. If someone told me there's a bug in net-wireless/ipw2200, I definitely would know that it is some sort of wireless driver/application. Sure, we all know that the categories in portage aren't perfect, but they're pretty good, for most cases. > > How to categorise is critical, if they are to have any meaning to > > users. > > Even if a pkg is slightly miscategorized, it still is a fair bit more > useful then having a flat namespace. Agreed. Let's look at something like dhcpcd. It resides in net-misc. Now, without that category, who would know it has *anything* to do with networking (assuming you don't know what DHCP is... :P)? Of course, that isn't the best example, but it does show the point. > > If you want to see if a package is in the tree, do you go > > straight to it, or do you find yourself doing things like: > > > > ls -d /usr/portage/*/<packagename>* > > > > to find it? > > err... > emerge -s <packagename> > pquery <packagename> > paludis -q <packagename> > > I'm honestly not really sure what point you're making there. I find myself first doing "emerge $packagename" since that *usually* works. ;] After that, I'll resort to some method of searching. -- Chris Gianelloni Release Engineering - Strategic Lead x86 Architecture Team Games - Developer Gentoo Linux
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part
