Re: Too much information! (And what to do about it.)
Ian Murdock writes ("Too much information! (And what to do about it.)"):
> With all of the new developers that are joining the Project and the
> number of new packages that are resulting from their involvement, it's
> becoming increasingly difficult, especially for newer users who aren't
> exactly sure what to look for, to browse the archive of packages
> without becoming overwhelmed at its sheer size. It's certainly great
> that all of these new packages are becoming available, but it's also
> presenting a problem for us, a problem which we need to address soon.
>
> What I propose we do is separate the "distribution" or "system"
> packages (those packages that constitute a complete system--definitely
> Base, Important, and Standard packages, and possibly Optional
> packages, too) from the "application" or "extra" packages that
> generally wouldn't be considered "part of an operating system".
>
> With two such trees, the distribution would be far easier to manage.
>
> Comments? Now would be the perfect time to do something like this;
> many mirror sites are going to have to redownload everything anyway.
In principle this sounds like a good idea. I don't have a strong
opinion on whether Optional should be included in the `distribution'.
However, it would be good if you don't break dselect's access methods
&c. These expect to find
`stable', `development', `contrib' and `non-free'
at the top level, and inside each a `binary' directory and in there a
`Packages.gz' file.
If you could make the split under there, by splitting each section
into two directories, that would work better, I think.
I think we should discuss this a bit before it gets done.
Ian.
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