On May 12, 2005, at 10:11 am, Patrick Lauer wrote:
On Wed, 2005-05-11 at 23:58 +0100, Stroller wrote:On May 11, 2005, at 8:10 pm, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
* Unique ID strings for packages, zynot style. Messy as hell though,
DEPEND="foo/bar {12379812AD7382164BD87678652438FC65E43A2}" doesn't have
the same kind of ring to it...
Maybe I'm just a messy person, but I really like this.So does Microsoft. The registry has many entries where 128bit (?) object-IDs are used. Very interesting to debug.
I'm going to ignore that. This thread started because the current category/name naming convention causes interesting conditions. I appreciate that generally Microsoft Are Not Our Favourite Software Company, but giving them as an example doesn't inherently make unique IDs bad, and 128-bit ones are not necessary in this case.
Also, before I start, I'd like to say that I know I'm not qualified to advocate this as a serious suggestion for adoption by Gentoo, so I'm just explaining _why I like it_.
It prevents upstream naming collisionsBut reduces readability for humans to zero. We don't want that.
Humans are used to dealing with indexes - we remember phone numbers easily, and if we're looking up several things in a large volume, then we're used to using bookmarks or noting down page numbers. A six figure decimal packageID allows for a million packages in the Portage tree (and I'm assuming versions will be separate, anyway), a five figure hex ID would allow far more.
Yes, arbitrary unique IDs would require an index tool to access ebuild name / category data, but surely there is little choice if naming-collisions are to be avoided and multiple categories are desired? Surely any human-focused naming convention will cause collisions and introduce potential for confusion? The current categories divide collisions into separate spaces, but they don't solve the problem of foo-player being eligible for both the media-CDplayers and audio-mp3rippers categories.
At least you haven't tried to optimize it all by using XML ...but the rest of us will use `esearch -o "%p\n" "" | grep -e category -e keyword`.*head explodes* No.
That's the first time I used that command, but it only took me two minutes to look up & test. Since a dedicated index tool would clearly be required, I'm sure it would have better & more useful syntax. Currently I assume that Mr Harring searches for all the applications in a category by typing `ls -d /usr/portage/app-category/*` - wouldn't it be easier to use `esearch --category country`. Not only would it list them all, but multiple categories per package would also allow those to be shown that might debatably be categorised as "western".
...It might make portage more resilient to one kind of problem, but forget debugging then.
Do we have 65000 unique packages in the tree? Would a four figure hex "part number" be that hard to remember when you're debugging package names?
Again: I know I'm not qualified to advocate this as a serious suggestion for adoption by Gentoo, so I'm just explaining _why I like it_.
Stroller.
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