On 04/09/14 06:42, Hugo Osvaldo Barrera wrote:
I've some stuff I'd like to discuss regarding AUR categores.
To begin with, categories are package metadata that lives in the AUR only. The PKGBUILDs have no reference to them, nor does pacman. This is really inconsistent with all of the other package variables, so I'd just like to propose we move this from merely being AUR metadata to the PKGBUILDS themselves, adding a "category" variable to them, eg:
category="games"
This would also leave the door open for pacman to process these variables in future, which could also be useful. I can't be the only person who's wanted to do something like "pacman -Q --category=games" to look for installed games. (the example syntax is horrible, but it's just to make it understandable).
Any opinions? Downsides? Comments?
How would a category variable be a significant improvement over: description='some game featuring cool stuff' By default, both pacman and AUR search by name and description. Of course, this is never going to be as accurate as filtering by a specific category - but is such accuracy really feasible? Most packages just don't fit neatly into a single, well-defined category. And if the category variable is allowed to be an array, it soon becomes no more effective than a carefully written description. But in any case, the elephant in the room here is the huge, up-front cost of (re-)categorizing all the packages. Without that effort, it's doubtful whether adding a category variable would give better results than simply searching the name/description for the equivalent keywords. tl;dr "pacman -Q --category=games" => pacman -Qs game