On Sat, Jun 25, 2011 at 08:22, Kent Fredric <[email protected]> wrote: > I think something else that may be important to consider if one is > eliminating category directories is how we'll replace the utility > currently provided by category/metadata.xml > > Some things are simply grossly impractical to maintain individual > metadata.xml for reliably due to volume ( ie: dev-perl/* , last I > looked, the metadata.xml in there presently is largely copy-pasted > between dists ) > Looking at the category/metadata.xml, it's a multilingual dictionary entry and little else. So make a dictionary of tags (categories). And what does the latter half have to do with tagging things? Where's the maintenance? There's the overhead of tagging it once, I'll grant. And then? Tags are unlikely to change all that frequently once they've been added (they don't need to).
> Perhaps we need a new way to apply metadata to a whole host of packages? > > Trying to make useflags apply to all packages > with a given tagset would be comparatively messy. > Why do you think that? The directory-like notation doesn't even need to be discarded: perl_module/* ssl > categories also make it easy to do Naïve iteration of packages > efficiently, ie: for the most part, if you want to iterate all > perl-modules, you just need to iterate dev-perl and perl-core , and > that is all, you're not bogged down by stepping into all the other > categories, loading all their files and working out whether or not > they're perl related. ( Yes, I am aware this has its own caveats, but > if you know of these caveats and they're acceptable to your task, then > its fine ) > Or just iterate over the perl_module tag. > the 'virtuals' category also is a bundle of fun. I really do not want > to see virtuals identified only by whatever their unique-idenitifier > might be and the tag 'virtual'. Yuck. > In the first place, it's still no different: mysql (the virtual) pulls in db-mysql (or "charles" or whatever name sounds good) whatever else is available. Or, as I mentioned before, while unique identifiers are really terribly simple, we are fully capable of working around the lack of that feature. What prevents virtual/mysql from pulling in database/mysql? Regards, Wyatt
