Re: Package Pool Proposal
Goswin Brederlow <goswin.brederlow@student.uni-tuebingen.de> writes:
> I think it will make finding much harder. Try to find the game called
> ?bink (where you don't know the first character). You would have to
> look through all directories.
I don't know of the game called bink (does it exist?) so I presume
you're talking about things like squake & xquake, which are produced
by a source package called ``quake''. Hmm...
> In my eyes the most usefull odering for humans would be the nature of
> a package:
Unfortunately, some packages don't fall into a single category. How
about an X11 program for editing & formatting mathematical formulas ?
Should it be under editors, maths, x11, or maybe tex?
> I would also be anoyed to see all those sparc, hurd, m68k, i386, alpha
> deb packages when looking for a source file.
How about:
ls *.gz
;-)
> For that reason the
> current structure of source/binary-xxx should be kept. Its far easier
> for humans to find stuff on the ftp archive and frontends don't realy
> care.
Of course there are odd cases (as revealed by a quick look through
Packages) for example, atfs is generated from the shapetools source,
which might not be initially obvious, but I think most cases actually
make more sense when using the source package name, and perhaps the
few that don't would be grounds for a wishlist bug to rename the
source package name.
> Another aspect is that ext2 performance goes down drastically with an
> increasing number of entries and ls output with many lines is unreadable
> by humans, esspecially with a ftp client that doesn't page. There
> shouldn't be to many files/directories in any directory.
I imagine that xfree86-1 is going to be about the only one that's
going to be a problem here. A grep for 'source: xfree86-1' in the
main packages file reveals 39 binary packages. Say we're talking
about keeping 4 versions for 10 architectures, then we'll probably
have about 1500 files in the xfree86-1 directory, which is a bit over
the top, but it is AFAIK an extreme case.
Perhaps we should allow for versioned subdirectories
(pool/x/xfree86-1/3.3.5-2/ say) which would keep this within
reasonable bounds, but I'm not sure it's worth it for this one case.
Cheers, Phil.
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