Re: New section in potato?
On Sun, Dec 13, 1998 at 12:04:05AM +0100, Kristoffer.Rose@ENS-Lyon.FR wrote:
> Joseph Carter writes:
>
> > "Desktop" with KDE and Gnome would be HUGE. No, Gnome section now, KDE
> > section later when we have KDE. Gnome and KDE are BOTH big enough for
> > their own sections, Gnome is as big as tex and KDE is bigger.
>
> Please: this is wrong! The sections are *not* there for our convenience
> but for the USERS to find what they WANT, based on CATEGORIES of software.
Gnome is a category unto itself really. Gnome applications are hardly
standalone, same with KDE.
> Rationale: The ultimate goal of the sections is to make it easy for even
> the novice user to pick the sections corresponding to the work areas they
> will be using.
>
> So the "tex" section was, IMHO, always a mistake and I'd definitely prefer
> that all the "tex" packages quietly migrated to the "text" section (or, in
> a few cases, elsewhere).
What I believe is a mistake is calling a great majority of the things
that are currently in x11 as x11. Arguably the only thing that seems any
bigger is probably devel or libs. I think we probably could serve to
rethink the sections all together, but I haven't a good suggestion for
physical layout of the archive handy at the moment. I also am not
certain it's really necessary yet. I'd rather be pro-active than
re-active on this one, but I'd like to know what other people think
before making real proposals.
I don't want to make changes for the sake of changes.
> > I'd suggest splitting the x11 section if I had a good idea as to how to
> > do it.
>
> IMHO the "x11" section should be renamed to "desktop" and then most X
> packages should be reassigned to admin/development/editors/... etc.
>
> Rationale: for the vast majority of users X is an absolutely essential
> component so it does not serve a useful purpose to identify it explicitly.
I disagree. The reason for seperating it is that it is HUGE for one and
for another you don't need/want X on a router. I do not support making
Debian a desktop-only distribution. By merging X with existing sections
we really cause problems with scalability with little change to the way
the user installs X. I -DO- think a section for window managers would
not be inappropriate. We all know there are enough of those to go
around.
> GNOME and KDE would be perfect "metapackages" (as often discussed) but
> their individual components should remain separate. (Whether a "meta"
> section is appropriate is a different discussion.)
Perhaps. I would really like to see package lists made by section
actually. That way if I want if I don't want to have KDE or Gnome
packages for example I can just not even download the package listings
for them. Problem here is that the idea sounds good but implementation
would be quite annoying. => If anyone has ideas about this or is really
interested I'll give it some thought and see what I think up.
> Having large sections is much better than having a large number of
> general-purpose ones. (A large number of special-purpose sections such as
> ham, electronics, etc., is a good thing, of course, as that is a genuine
> help.)
Arguably the current sections really cause problems.. You're looking for
some perl thing that can be used with apache, do you look in web or in
interpreters? Bad example because probably it's in web in this case, but
you understand my point I hope?
The discussion that has come up now and then suggests we move to a
keyword system instead of a sections system. I think this might be the
answer, but I recall having some issues with the implementation methods
suggested. Probably related to backward compatibility. =>
--
"You're despicable." -- Daffy Duck
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