2011/6/24 Zac Medico <zmed...@gentoo.org>: > On 06/22/2011 11:15 PM, Jesús J. Guerrero Botella wrote: >> 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 some reason, using symlinks to represent tags seems like an odd > approach to me. I think it would be much more sensible to put them in > metadata.xml or an ebuild variable. If for some reason you want symlinks > representing the tags (I don't know why you would), you can always use a > script to generate symlinks from metadata.xml files.
You might not like it, but Gentoo categories have always been directories, not words into metadata.xml. Most portage tools rely on that. Not a strong argument, I know that. But someone used this argument when someone else wanted to put portage into a database instead of an fs-based tree. That was long ago, admittedly, don't know if that conversation ever came up again. I've personally never bothered to learn how to use external tools anyway, so I just navigate the tree using command line tools when I need to know something about a given package. I am sure I am not alone in that regard. I guess I could also "nano metadata.xml", ugh! Some portage GUIs also use this categorization scheme, like portato or porthole (not that they are important at all, but they illustrate the trend). Maybe it's just my mind model is archaic, but I can't really agree with tagging for massive trees. I wouldn't drop all my 40 thousand songs into a single folder and rely on tagging to keep them at hand. Portage has way more files so I don't see how tagging would be better for it than it would be for my music collection. I might be too much influenced by *nix (and DOS) OSes at this stage to be able to see the advantages of tagging (besides the decorative function), I admit. -- Jesús Guerrero Botella
