Re: Packaging system improvements
Adrian Bridgett wrote:
>
> On Jul 7, Erik Andersen wrote
> > On Jul 7, Brian White wrote
> > > > 1. We need to add a "Keywords: ..." line to the control file for each
> > > > package. However, the success of this depends more on the keywords
> > > > individual maintainers put in their packages keyword lists than the
> > > > presence of special features for it.
> >
> > It seems to me that the proposed "Keywords:" field is supposed to
> > help organize the distribition, but the "Section:" field is already
> > doing this. The current sections divide the distribution by category
> > already, without the need for any new field.
Actually, the Keywords: field was proposed for the new Deity tool.
They are used to pare down the list of 1300 currently available
debian packages down to a more manageable 200-300 packages. The
hope is that this will make the deity selection list much easier
to use.
For more information please refer to:
http://www.verisim.com/~behanw/deity/
> How about a full hierarchal structure than the two levels we currently
> have - which are non-free/control/main as the first level and then
> base/web/doc/devel/... as the second level.
I don't think this buys you anything. Despite being able to
categorize a package down even further, you are still categorizing
things buy a single feature. But what feature should you use?
Is emacs classified as an editor? An X11 program? A full-screen
program? A web browser? A mail reader? It can be classified as
anyone of those things and more. Many programs (although to a
lesser extent than emacs) fit into multiple categories.
Now, if you use Keywords on the otherhand, you can specify multiple
categories for each package. All packages can be described in
multiple ways after all.
And anyways, why should we make the directory structure any more
complicated than it is already?
Thanks,
Behan
--
Behan Webster mailto:behanw@verisim.com
+1-613-224-7547 http://www.verisim.com/
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