On Tue, 18 Jul 2006 21:40:07 +0100 Ciaran McCreesh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Tue, 18 Jul 2006 21:18:22 +0200 "Kevin F. Quinn" > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > | > Uh, as far as I recall, you've yet to come up with any technical > | > explanation other than "it breaks one of my pet projects"... The > | > gains of consistency and manageability far outweigh the minor > | > inconvenience. > | > | Scan back through the -dev archives. We've been over this many > times, | in excruciating detail, not that it ever makes any > difference. > > Well that's kinda the point. You haven't. Every time it's just the > same vague "stuff breaks", without anything genuine value of stuff > that isn't someone's pet poorly written toy to back it up. Did you bother to search back through the archives? I know I've posted about this ad nauseum before. Things that package moves cause: 1) Dependencies throughout the tree have to be updated 2) Current installations become inconsistent with respect to the tree 3) Binary packages go out-of-date 4) Increased sync load 5) Loss of history, unless the move is performed server-side (i.e. extra work for infra) fixpackages makes some effort to fix 3, but it's a band-aid solution. For a start, it assumes the binary packages are all present however binary packages may be archived off-line. fixpackages also takes a fair amount of resource to run, resource that end-users don't need to commit if we avoid unnecessary package moves. 4 & 5 would be mitigated when/if we move to SVN. In my opinion moving packages from one category to another just causes unnecessary disruption to the tree - all relevant dependencies throughout the tree have to be altered, putting current installations out-of-date with respect to it. The key issue is that categories are semantically inadequate. Deciding which category a package fits into is subjective, frequently a package fits into many categories yet the category system insists that a package belong to one and only one category. Usually these big package moves occur when people want to align herds with categories, which is a waste of time - also it's daft as packages can sensibly belong to more than one herd. Unfortunately we see a lot of it in the tree. This week it's packages that have voip functionality that are being moved to net-voip. In six months time it'll be someone else wanting to move all packages with IM functionality into net-im. In herd-speak, these packages could easily belong to both the voip and im herds, should such exist; those providing c++ libraries could also belong to the cpp herd. This is useful, as the maintainers of those herds can each deal with issues in their field. It doesn't matter which category it's in. The only concrete thing categories give us is the ability to have two packages with the same upstream name without having to mangle the upstream name. Unfortunately the category system is deeply embedded in portage and the tree, so changing that system is simply not going to happen, which is why I've stopped whinging about the semantic inadequacy of the system. -- Kevin F. Quinn
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