2011/6/23 Kent Fredric <kentfred...@gmail.com>: > On 23 June 2011 09:46, Zac Medico <zmed...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > In order for this metadata to be of any use to a user, it would need > to have some way to facilitate its use, whether it be a fake generated > directory of symlinks, or a dedicated program ( like debians aptitude > ) for exploring this data in a tag-oriented way.
The problem is that there's no official GUI for portage, and I don't think we should have that either. Symlinks are clean, and portage has always been file-oriented so I see no problem with using them for this. All we need is to deference the symlink to find the real name of the package and put it in world instead of the symlinked name, so the rest of packages won't even need to be retouched to fix the dependencies. I don't really know if it's that simple as it sounds, but it's an idea. For the user, it will be a convenient way to look into media-tv, and find there all the tv players like kaffeine and mplayer that s/he would not have found otherwise. Even portage managers like portato will list the packages following the directory structure, so I think we should concentrate on that, rather than doing fancy things that won't be useful for a thousand years. Tags might be elegant, but I don't think they are practical for the average Gentoo user, which probably is the kind of user that sets USE="-semantic-desktop" to avoid using the whole kde tagging system. I also don't know if the advantages of tagging are really worth all the pain to implement. And after that, every Gentoo user will have to learn a new way to interact with portage when it comes to searching the package s/he needs. -- Jesús Guerrero Botella
