[aur-general] Categories

[kachelaqa]

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