Re: New section in potato?
Joseph Carter writes:
> "Desktop" with KDE and Gnome would be HUGE. No, Gnome section now, KDE
> section later when we have KDE. Gnome and KDE are BOTH big enough for
> their own sections, Gnome is as big as tex and KDE is bigger.
Please: this is wrong! The sections are *not* there for our convenience
but for the USERS to find what they WANT, based on CATEGORIES of software.
Rationale: The ultimate goal of the sections is to make it easy for even
the novice user to pick the sections corresponding to the work areas they
will be using.
So the "tex" section was, IMHO, always a mistake and I'd definitely prefer
that all the "tex" packages quietly migrated to the "text" section (or, in
a few cases, elsewhere).
> I'd suggest splitting the x11 section if I had a good idea as to how to
> do it.
IMHO the "x11" section should be renamed to "desktop" and then most X
packages should be reassigned to admin/development/editors/... etc.
Rationale: for the vast majority of users X is an absolutely essential
component so it does not serve a useful purpose to identify it explicitly.
GNOME and KDE would be perfect "metapackages" (as often discussed) but
their individual components should remain separate. (Whether a "meta"
section is appropriate is a different discussion.)
Having large sections is much better than having a large number of
general-purpose ones. (A large number of special-purpose sections such as
ham, electronics, etc., is a good thing, of course, as that is a genuine
help.)
Cheers,
Kristoffer
--
Kristoffer Høgsbro Rose, phd, prof.associé <http://www.ens-lyon.fr/~krisrose>
addr: LIP, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, 46 Allée d'Italie, F-69364 Lyon 7
phone: +33(0)4 7272 8642, fax +33(0)4 7272 8080 <Kristoffer.Rose@ENS-Lyon.FR>
pgp f-p: A4D3 5BD7 3EC5 7CA2 924E D21D 126B B8E0 <krisrose@{debian,tug}.org>
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