Re: [gentoo-dev] Proposal: sys-pam category

["Nathan L. Adams" <nadams@ieee.org>]

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Ned Ludd wrote:
> *poof* we now reshuffle, but then we can do auth with ldap. So lets
> move 
> all the */ldap* related subjects under it sys-auth/... Then a month or 
> six later comes along sys-ldap and it gets moved there. The logic will 
> go full circle before long if we consistently keep shuffling packages
> around.
> 
> All in all this is seriously the reason why ebuilds have a DESCRIPTION= 
> and one of the reasons we have metadata.xml files.
>

Well obviously there needs to be a consensus on *how* to logically
organize things before anyone goes willy nilly changing stuff. Do you
group by what the package is used for (email vs. game vs. web browser)
or by what it is built from (PERL stuff, Gnome apps, KDE apps). It
appears that currently its a mix. Is that documented anywhere?

I personally think the organization should be from an end-user
perspective as much as possible. Imagine for a moment that you are a
Genewbie (new Gentoo user). You have a new minimal installation and you
want to add some applications. How do you know what your choices are for
an email client, for instance? You could find most things here:

http://packages.gentoo.org/packages/?category=mail-client

But that wouldn't let you know about kmail, a fairly important option.

If you were to do a search, you wouldn't get much either:

# emerge -s email
Searching...
[ Results for search key : email ]
[ Applications found : 5 ]

*  dev-perl/Email-Find
*  dev-perl/Email-Valid
*  net-mail/archivemail
*  net-mail/email
*  net-mail/sendEmail

So while the metadata.xml files do exist, I don't see how they are
_currently_ very useful to the end-users. Again, I think better
organization and improved tools are both worth while.

Nathan

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