On Wed, Feb 04, 2009 at 03:06:45PM -0500, John Altobelli wrote: > Hello everyone, > > For the past week I've been working on a branch of nixpkgs that moves > the packages into an file hierarchy modeled after the Gentoo portage > system (http://gentoo-portage.com/Browse). I have since completed the > reorganization and would like to get the opinions of the developers > here about whether they like this new hierarchy and whether it would > be worth moving into mainline.
Even if this patch doesn't go into mainstream we should strive to lessen the bad feeling gentoo users get when not knowing where to put packages. I have to admit that I was close (maybe I even did) proposing such a change as well. So we should at least rethink about the policy and adding such a sentence such as "If you don't know exactly where to put a package just put it into misc and stop worrying" (That's what I've done in the past :) Eg its hard in nix to find all packages which use compiler X or such. Why does this matter? If you get the wrong application you'll have to wait till compiler A or tool B has been installed as well. So in the past I enjoyed jumping into a gentoo dev-X ordner just to read all description to see which open source software is availible to solve a particular task. That the policy hasn't been enough was proven by some people starting new sections: ### DESKTOP ENVIRONMENTS ### SCIENCE/GEOMETRY ### SCIENCE/BIOLOGY ### SCIENCE/MATH ### SCIENCE/LOGIC ### SCIENCE / ELECTRONICS ### SCIENCE / MATH ### MISC which I think has been a good change because you can just walk through all MATH packages to see wether you should learn about another tool which can be installed easily. Meanwhile I've added a pointer to the policy at the top of all-packages.nix. Marc Weber _______________________________________________ nix-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.cs.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
