Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Duane Malcolm <d.malcolm AT auckland.ac.nz>]

Jeremy Blosser wrote:
> 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.

The question is,
Are the sections in the grimoire:
a) for storage and for the convinience of the maintainer
b) for users to search for a types of spells
c) for both a) and b)

I think it should be a)
b) this isn't the most effective way of doing this
c) is trying to kill two birds with one stone and is even less effective

Others may think differently.


> 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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