Re: Bug#144046: general: Sections are not finely grained
On Tue, Apr 23, 2002 at 11:57:00AM +0300, Dmitry Borodaenko <d.borodaenko@sam-solutions.net> was heard to say:
> On Mon, Apr 22, 2002 at 02:12:45PM -0400, Daniel Burrows wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 22, 2002 at 01:04:28PM -0400, Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> was heard to say:
> > > It's a very fine piece of work, and it must be a hell of a
> > > lot of work to keep it all updated independant of the rest of Debian.
> <...>
> > The problem is that we have 9500 packages, and it's really hard
> > to classify all of them in a sane and consistent manner -- from the
> > sheer volume if nothing else. More than that, the problem is that
> > people would rather theorize about the best possible ontological
> > classification on mailing lists than sit down and categorize packages.
>
> I think the problem is that centralized solution to package
> classification doesn't scale. What would scale is sharing responsibility
> for package classification among package maintainers and package users.
That sounds like a good idea, but look at our menu system. It's a
godawful mess; it needs a huge increase in the number of sections, and
no-one can do it because (A) it would require a policy change, and
(B) it would then require every maintainer to rewrite his/her menu files
for the new system. (in addition, the distributed nature means that
stuff in gray areas gets strewn around randomly depending on the whims
of the individual maintainers)
Heck, look at our section system. Yes, there are some problems with
the granularity, but (to pick on an arbitrary example) how everybuddy
can be in section "x11" instead of section "net" completely escapes me.
Even if we did most of the work in a distributed fashion, I still
think at least one person should dedicate a fair portion of their time
to reviewing the hierarchy and making sure it makes sense.
Daniel
--
/-------------------- Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> -------------------\
| Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the |
| process he does not become a monster. And when you look |
| into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. |
| -- Friedrich Nietzsche |
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