Re: Misclassification of packages; "libs" and "doc" sections

[Eyal Lotem <eyal@hyperroll.com>]

On Sun, 08 Oct 2000, Thomas Hood wrote:
> 1) It seems to me that many packages are in the wrong
> section.  E.g., the "X11" section contains many programs
> that *use* X as opposed to implementing and supporting X.
> But these packages ought to be located in the section that
> describes what they do or what they are about.  Otherwise
> every app with an X interface would go in "x11".  Comments?
>
> 2) It seems to me that the "libs" and "doc" sections of
> the archive are anomalous in that they classify packages
> based on something other than the purpose or theme of the
> contents, with the result that we have cross-cutting
> classification schemes.  Why, e.g., is libaudiofile0 in
> "libs" while "libasound0" is in "sound"?

In my oppinion, this represents the weakness of heirarchial structures for 
classification.
In my oppinion, 'lib', 'sound' and the rest of those should be 'boolean 
properties' or 'qualifiers' of a package, so that you can look for all the 
'lib packages', all the 'sound packages', or whatever combination you may 
want.  (libasound would be both a lib package, and a sound package).
This could fit in with the 'package pools' idea perhaps.  This would cancel 
out the possibility to store it within a file system heirarchy, but is that 
very helpful?

Just a thought,

Eyal Lotem