[gentoo-dev] Portage Ebuild Categories: a suggestion

[Sean Mitchell <SMitchell@phoenix-interactive.com>]

This is probably the single biggest issue on this list. It seems that every
day there's a post questioning why an ebuild is in a given location and not
some other.

I really don't see how anyone could ever come up with a structure that's
intuitive for everyone... we just don't all think the same way. For myself,
I don't even bother with the structure, I prefer to do a find on *.ebuild in
/usr/portage to see what's there.

A few years ago I put together a series of OS/2 shareware CDs and had the
same problem - many packages didn't clearly fit in one place or another.

The solution I came up with and the one I suggest here is that the
categories be eliminated altogether. in this case one big /usr/portage with
a directory for each package.

I mean, it's easy enough to grep the description fields, or even put all
possible categories in a new tag in the ebuild. It would be simple to put
together some tools to show the packages by category if desired.

Something like:

S=${WORKDIR}/${P}
DESCRIPTION="A graphical file comparator and merge tool simular to xdiff."
CATEGORY="dev-util x11-misc"
SRC_URI="http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/xxdiff/${P}.src.tar.gz"
HOMEPAGE="http://xxdiff.sourceforge.net/"


What do you think?

Sean