Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Jeremy Blosser <jblosser-smgl AT firinn.org>]

On Feb 24, Robin Cook [rcook AT wyrms.net] wrote:
> I personally dislike having to search though all the sections looking
> for gnome programs myself but then for GUI programs I tend to run GTK+ /
> Gnome programs exclusively.  I was for the subsections back when they
> were first discussed but it was decided that it was too difficult at
> that time to implement, don't know if that has gotten any easier or not.
> If there was a way to implement it another way that is more elegant and
> easier I would be in favor of it.  And it is definitely easier for me to
> maintain when they are in a single section.
> CuZnDragon
> Robin Cook

There are basically 3 aspects to each application:

- environment it runs in/depends on (shell, x, gnome/kde/some wm, etc)
- audience that uses it (admins, local users, remote users, the system itself)
- the function it provides (text filter, window manager, graphics program,
  science program)

We can list each of these components in the section name to make it clear
what things are:

shell-admin-utils
shell-script-utils
x-admin-utils
gnome-admin-utils
gnome-apps-graphics

etc.  Obviously some things are implied; "gnome-admin-utils" could just as
easily be "x-gnome-admin-utils", but there's no point being excessive.

Of course the trick being noted here is which way we do the ordering in
this kind of system.  As Duane rightly noted, it's largely a question of if
we organize for section maintenance/searching by dependencies, or for user
convenience/searching by funtions.

The former gives us environment-audience-function, eg:
gnome
gnome-apps
gnome-apps-graphics
gnome-apps-mail
kde
kde-apps
kde-apps-graphics
kde-apps-mail
shell
shell-apps
shell-apps-mail
[system]
[system-]daemon
[system-]daemon-mail

The latter gives us instead function-audience-environment, eg:
graphics
graphics-apps
graphics-apps-gnome
graphics-apps-kde
mail
mail-apps
mail-apps-gnome
mail-apps-kde
mail-apps-shell
mail-daemon[-system]

Notes:
- The former is much easier on maintainers of entire environments like
  gnome/kde, but the latter is easier on maintainers of functions like
  mail, graphics, ftp, etc.
- The former is easier for users that want to find "new KDE apps to try", "new
  daemons to try", but the latter is easier on people that want to find "a
  mail app" or "a mail daemon".  Finding "a KDE mail app" is about the same
  either way, except that the latter would make it easier to see all
  clients at once to let you find clients that work fine under KDE and are
  what you want, even if they don't specifically use kdelibs.

In short, the former means all mail clients will never be in the same
section, but scattered around.  The latter means all gnome apps will never
be in the same section, but scattered around.  Which of these is worse?

I think we have a mix of this in the grimoire right now.  While the former
is more naturally the way I want to organize things, and in fact the way I
organized the utils section into other sections, the more I think about it
the more I think the latter makes more sense for both users and
maintainers.  While we do maintain some things based on dependencies
(gnome, kde, window managers, etc.).  I think we still do more based on
function (mail, ftp), and this just makes more sense to users looking for
things.

As Duane also noted if we wanted to get fancy we could add these tokens to
DETAILS and write stuff to let people present things in the groupings they
wanted, but even without that people can always switch the ordering for
section browsing with some simple find commands if the setion names contain
the information.

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