* Philip Brown <ppb at usc.edu> [2007-10-22 16:52]: > Joe Di Pol wrote: > > Danek Duvall wrote: > >>>... > >> The way we'd intended to do these was to dump everything into a single > >> package, tag files appropriately, and use filters to install selectively. > >> That is, > >> > >> file path=usr/lib/libsdl.so.1 > >> file path=usr/lib/libsdl.so devel=true > >> directory path=usr/include/sdl devel=true > >> file path=usr/include/sdl/sdl.h devel=true > >> file path=usr/man/man3/libsdl.3 docs=true > >> > >> etc. Locale-specific packages would be handled similarly, but there you'd > >> have a "locale" tag which would specify the locale a particular file > >> belonged to. > > > > I wonder if this is a case were technical elegance is getting in the way > > of familiarity and usability. Tagging and filtering appear to have some > > excellent use cases, but I'm not sure using them to functionally organize > > a package is one. > > > > Folks are pretty familiar with the concept of a package name reflecting > > what it contains, and being able to use that name to get what they want. > > It's hard to see how filtering is better than "pkg install foo-docs" > > > > Yup. wearing my "plain user" hat rather than my "developer" hat, I much > prefer typing > > pkg install foo-devel > > rather than > > pkg install foo devel=true > > It's an existing de facto standard of behaviour, and users are comfortable > with it already. Dare I say, "expect it".
Actually, the default filter settings are part of the image configuration. So, if you wanted developer content, you'd ask for it once, on all packages, for that image. - Stephen -- sch at sun.com http://blogs.sun.com/sch/
