[aur-general] Categories

[kachelaqa]

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).