ngaba@petra.hos.u-szeged.hu wrote:
Not at all. Suppose say that all the text editors where in a group called editors. Then pacman -S editors would have installed all of them, and I very much doubt the possibility that anyone will ever need every available editor. The categories on the other hand are only a way of grouping packages for easier searching/browsing through them. This becomes especially valuable when you need a package from a certain category, but you are not acquainted with all of the possible options. Say you need a video player but you're new to the world of GNU/Linux. You haven't heard of mplayer, xine, vlc. But if there is category multimedia you just scan the packages in it and try them until you like some. So I think that a category info would be a most valuable asset to .PKGINFO and the community itself... The way I see it a package can belong to several categories at once - for example totem would be in both multimedia and gnome categories.
I still think, that groups are ideal for this ;-) After "pacman -S editors" you get a question if you want to install the whole group content or you wanna choose some packages by hand, this is useful for "categories" too imho. AFAIK packages can belong to multiple groups too. However, I'm not sure, that we can split groups between repos, but probably we can. Bye, ngaba
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Every component of a package management system should have only one well defined and clear purpose. Groups should not be use out of their originally intended context and the inclusion of categories information would be very easy and straight-forward. It would require the addition of only a couple of methods to libalpm and pacman. The packages that do not currently include category info in their .PKGINFO file will be considered members of some standard category - say "Others", or will be considered to simply have no category and will be outside the scope of the tools that deal with categories. Then each maintainer while preparing the release of the new packages maintained by him will simply add the category info and in a couple of months most packages will be using this system. If the developers don't have the time/desire/manpower to look into my suggestion I will personally volunteer to provide a sample implementation which that they may consider. P.S. All other major PMS support categories - portage, yum, apt... Pacman should not lag behind.