On Tue, Nov 27, 2001 at 08:36:34PM +0100, Anthony Mallet wrote:
> 
> What do you think of adding a SEE_ALSO variable in the pkgs Makefiles,
> which would describe, for each package, other packages related to it?
> Just like the section of man pages of the same name, it would allow users
> to be aware of all the alternate packages that could be useful, at a
> glance, and before installing or unpacking anything. And very otfen, man
> pages for various softwares do not provide this information at all.
> 
> For instance, I was looking a few days ago for an alternative to
> latex2html, but I did not know where to search exactly, and I was obliged
> to look to the 'DESCR' file of many packages, in many directories (print,
> converters, textprocs). Finally I got the information with google and
> came back to pkgsrc afterward. Package names are not always
> self-explanatory :)
> 
> The SEE_ALSO variable is not an 'absolutely needed feature' (there are
> many ways to find the information elsewhere), but it could be great to
> have it.
> 
> Comments?

Sounds like a nice idea for me, but I guess it would be a real pain
to maintain as packages are added or extinct; You'd have to search
through all SEE_ALSOs like you just searched through all DESC to find
all instances pointing there when a package gets removed to remove the
information in the variable; if you add a package you have to dig through
all of the DESCS to see what package really is something that could reference
teh new package as a SEE_ALSO [Package names are not always self-explanatory ;)]

Buuut, I'd like the idea to easily have a pointer to an alternative.

Martin Weber