> > Categories themselves were not a design mistake. The design mistake is > using categories to permit conflicting package names. > > Categories are convenient. Sure, they're not perfect but they serve > their purpose to some degree and there's little harm in having them. > If you want to organize packages better, nobody's stopping you. Until > you've got a better and widespread replacement, I don't see why people > shouldn't be using categories as they see fit. > > The other part is something we could aim for fixing but so far most > developers seems to disagree with me, so there's no point in pursuing > that. >
So how about improving categories instead? Rough idea: * introduce 1st, 2nd, 3rd class categories, categorized in metadata somewhere * 1st class is what you want in your world file (and default setting) * 2nd class is everything else * 3rd class is stuff that should never be in your world file (but still can be, if you want) Then tooling can (maybe output a warning but) default to highest class category if none is given. Examples: * 1st class: app-*, dev-lang, games-*, ... * 2nd class: dev-haskell, dev-perl, dev-php, dev-python, dev-texlive, media-libs, net-libs, sci-libs, ... * 3rd class: acct-*, perl-core, virtual -- Andreas K. Hüttel dilfri...@gentoo.org Gentoo Linux developer (council, toolchain, base-system, perl, libreoffice)
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