On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 02:44:16PM +0100, Stuart Henderson wrote: > On 2013/05/31 08:43, Eric Radman wrote: > > Some 10 years ago the 'books' category was added to ports. I presume > > this category was experimental. Has it proved to be useful? > > should it be deprecated? > > > > Consider how I might read "Dive Into Python": > > > If you already know about the book, then yes of course there are other > ways to read it which might be easier. But another way to think of it is > as a guide to books which porters have found useful/interesting enough > that they want to share them with others.
Okay, from that vantage point they're useful, but in that case isn't this directory wildly incomplete? Now if there were 200 titles it could be a compelling resource. > > There are some benefits to insisting that users keep such material in > > their home directories instead: > > > > - root privileges not required > > - files will still be there after the next upgrade > > I don't understand this about upgrades, do you mean that you want > to specifically keep an older version when ports has updated to > a newer one? Upgrading of course doesn't remove existing packages.. Yes, `pkg_add -ui` preserves packages. But I tend to remove all packages and then reisntall the packages I need on each machine. > > - easier to locate material I've downloaded personally > > It might be useful to consolidate the installed files into a single > directory (/usr/local/share/books?) I think that's a great idea.
