Having used both Gentoo and NixOS, I don't see the advantage of Gentoo's categories over Nix's current system. In fact, as other have pointed out, I think having a single level is less convenient than having a full directory structure. You say that for Gentoo, it's immediately obvious where to put a new package. Why? Just because there are more packages in Gentoo, and it's easier to find a similar one? That'd hardly be an argument for the categorization, only one for putting more packages into Nix ...
Generally, cateogories serve a number of different purposes: organization of packages, finding packages, and disambiguation of names. Organization only applies to developers, and in the end, I don't care very much which system we use. I think the current one is fine, actually. For finding packages, I strongly believe that a keyword/tag system is superior to simple categories. Each package should be allowed to have multiple tags. For disambiguation, Nixpkgs currently doesn't have a system in place (whereas Gentoo categories are used for this purpose as well). That might be worth thinking about, because arbitrarily renaming one of two conflicting packages seems a bit strange. Cheers, Andres _______________________________________________ nix-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.cs.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
