On Sun, Jun 26, 2011 at 5:53 AM, Patrick Lauer <patr...@gentoo.org> wrote: > So again, what are you trying to fix, and what makes you think it was > broken to start with?
Well, I think there are things worth improving. However, I'm not sure that we should consider implementation of tagging a reason to re-design the entire portage system. I think the simplest way to go about tagging is to just stick tags in metadata.xml and not change the way anything else works fundamentally. I could see a little room for allowing for future expansion, such as defining namespaces in the xml. Then you could have a set of description tags, and later a set of file tags (a la portage file search). Lack of tools to do something with the tags isn't a problem - they'll happen. Probably the first place to do something with tags would be packages.gentoo.org - if I want a quick list of all the text editors on the system I don't mind doing a quick web search. Sure, we can later expand things to provide a metadata index of some kind and then command-line tools to search tags, or maybe a program that sets up a tree full of symlinks or whatever after doing a sync. I don't see why these have to be fully worked out to implement the concept. I think we should avoid changing the fundamental design of portage, such as removing categories or allowing tags to be used as dependencies/etc. At least, not right now. If we set up namespaces for tags that might allow for such a thing in the future. Also, there is no reason that tools couldn't help maintain the tags - certainly if we used a tag namespace to list the files installed by a package we'd want to automate that. I don't think we should try to tackle that out of the gates - for starters the list is version-specific and not package-specific, so you'd either need to figure out how to sanely build and maintain a union of everything, or tag tags with package versions or something. The main driver behind tags seems to be searchability, and I think that is something we could easily improve. I don't think we should hold that up over an initiative to completely re-architect Gentoo... Rich
