Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: New category proposal

[Stroller <stroller@stellar.eclipse.co.uk>]

On May 12, 2005, at 10:11 am, Patrick Lauer wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-05-11 at 23:58 +0100, Stroller wrote:
>> On May 11, 2005, at 8:10 pm, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
>>>
>>> * Unique ID strings for packages, zynot style. Messy as hell though,
>>> DEPEND="foo/bar {12379812AD7382164BD87678652438FC65E43A2}" doesn't 
>>> have
>>> the same kind of ring to it...
>>
>> Maybe I'm just a messy person, but I really like this.
> So does Microsoft. The registry has many entries where 128bit (?)
> object-IDs are used. Very interesting to debug.

I'm going to ignore that. This thread started because the current 
category/name naming convention causes interesting conditions. I 
appreciate that generally Microsoft Are Not Our Favourite Software 
Company, but giving them as an example doesn't inherently make unique 
IDs bad, and 128-bit ones are not necessary in this case.

Also, before I start, I'd like to say that I know I'm not qualified to 
advocate this as a serious suggestion for adoption by Gentoo, so I'm 
just explaining _why I like it_.

>>  It prevents upstream naming collisions
> But reduces readability for humans to zero. We don't want that.

Humans are used to dealing with indexes - we remember phone numbers 
easily, and if we're looking up several things in a large volume, then 
we're used to using bookmarks or noting down page numbers. A six figure 
decimal packageID allows for a million packages in the Portage tree 
(and I'm assuming versions will be separate, anyway), a five figure hex 
ID would allow far more.

Yes, arbitrary unique IDs would require an index tool to access ebuild 
name / category data, but surely there is little choice if 
naming-collisions are to be avoided and multiple categories are 
desired? Surely any human-focused naming convention will cause 
collisions and introduce potential for confusion? The current 
categories divide collisions into separate spaces, but they don't solve 
the problem of foo-player being eligible for both the media-CDplayers 
and audio-mp3rippers categories.

> At least you haven't tried to optimize it all by using XML ...
>> but the rest of us will use
>> `esearch -o "%p\n" "" | grep -e category -e keyword`.
> *head explodes*
> No.

That's the first time I used that command, but it only took me two 
minutes to look up & test. Since a dedicated index tool would clearly 
be required, I'm sure it would have better & more useful syntax. 
Currently I assume that Mr Harring searches for all the applications in 
a category by typing `ls -d /usr/portage/app-category/*` - wouldn't it 
be easier to use `esearch --category country`. Not only would it list 
them all, but multiple categories per package would also allow those to 
be shown that might debatably be categorised as "western".

> ...It might make portage more resilient to one kind of problem,
> but forget debugging then.

Do we have 65000 unique packages in the tree? Would a four figure hex 
"part number" be that hard to remember when you're debugging package 
names?

Again: I know I'm not qualified to advocate this as a serious 
suggestion for adoption by Gentoo, so I'm just explaining _why I like 
it_.

Stroller.

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