Re: History behind pkgsrc 'biology' category

[Kamil Rytarowski <n54%gmx.com@localhost>]

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I have experienced a reclassification of packages in one Linux
distribution. The original categories were inherited from old Red Hat
from 90s.

People wanted to revamp them to current reality and load balance the
number of packages in each category. In the end they entered into
perpetual alterations and movements, they worked for several days and
the result was much worse than the original hierarchy. People were
dissatisfied.

I'm against any modification of categories. Please set them in stone.
Even if they might be misleading in some cases, people are used to
them, we have got scripts for the current sets of categories, websites
etc. Please don't break it for no benefit.

On 06.02.2016 20:33, Alistair Crooks wrote:
> In general, yes. In this case, no :( But I don't think it matters
> much to the general pkgsrc user.
> 
> I dislike the situation we have now, where there are multiple
> choices of category for a package. That's a personal thing, and
> having to look locally as to whether a package is in time/
> sysutils/ devel/ or net/ is one thing that annoys me. I find I look
> for everything on pkgsrc.se nowadays, but even that has failed me
> where I've used the wrong package name (pkg vs. pkgng). So I think
> having one place to look is, or that springs to mind initially, is
> best. And I think "science" overlaps so many of biology, math/,
> chemistry/, physics/. And where do you stop? molecular-biology,
> astro-physics/, nuclear-medicine?
> 
> In the whole scheme of things, if we had a VCS tool that could
> track moves, that would be great. But we don't, and all follow up
> on that should go to tech-repository@. In the meantime, let's
> assume that moving pkgsrc entries between categories (physical
> movement, rather than listing tags under CATEGORIES) ist verboten,
> so we'll have to try to get it right a priori.
> 
> I think, medium to longer term, it won't matter much to the vast 
> majority of users, as long as the right search tools are there, and
> as we move to different tools (there's a lot more involved than
> mere repo conversion, though). And for those search tools, a huge
> and resounding THANK YOU! to the guys who do pkgsrc.se
> 
> Best, Alistair
> 
> On 6 February 2016 at 11:07, Greg Troxel <gdt%ir.bbn.com@localhost> wrote:
>> 
>> Jason Bacon <bacon4000%gmail.com@localhost> writes:
>> 
>>> 2) I'd like to see a general science category.  As it is now,
>>> some science packages get shoehorned into math or biology.
>>> (e.g. chemtool, py-scipy) Where there aren't enough packages to
>>> warrant certain more specific categories, science would be a
>>> more intuitive place to look for them.
>> 
>> That sounds ok to me.  I would rather add it sooner than later,
>> because I think renaming packages has significant cost.
>> 
>> Other opinions?

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