On 05/09/14 23:38, Nowaker wrote:
The thing is description is to *describe* the package in a few words. It's not for categorization.
There's a lot of overlap between describing and categorizing. The pkgdesc is free-form text, so there's no reason why a few extra words can't be added to help with searching.
Should tags be present, people will just assign them. Just like they already provide url= or license=, although there is no functional gain from having them. They just exist in PKGBUILD wiki & template and most people happily use them. Just add tags= to the template, and after a year most packages use it too.
The OP's use-case was searching for *all* the installed games on his system. Your form of tagging wouldn't provide a solution for that, because it just attaches optional, arbitrary flags to the package meta-data. (In fact, it's effectively the same as adding a few extra words to the description). True categorization requires that all packages have at least one category assigned to them from a controlled list. The only genuine purpose of categorization is to help with searching. If there are too few, or too many categories, or if the categories aren't assigned properly, it can quickly become useless (this is pretty much the current situation with the AUR). It's actually a little strange that pacman doesn't currently provide any form of categorization, because almost all other package managers do. I don't think this has got anything to do with KISS, or because it's an inherently flawed idea; I think it's simply because no one has so far been sufficiently motivated to pay the cost of actually implementing it. (And also maybe because there has never been much real demand for it from the arch community as a whole).