Re: education category?

[Alistair Crooks <agc%pkgsrc.org@localhost>]

On Wed, Jan 23, 2008 at 06:38:52PM +0100, Roland Illig wrote:
> Jeremy C. Reed wrote:
> >Three different categories are listed above as already 
> >used for typing tutors. What should I use: misc, games, textproc, or 
> >other?
> 
> Just use misc for all these packages. I've never seen any documentation 
> on the CATEGORIES variable. Does anyone know why we have it and what it 
> is good for?

No, misc is almost never the right solution. We should be trying to move
packages out of the catch-all, also-ran categories. Within reason.

The CATEGORIES variable is used to segment the binary packages
namespace.  You can have additional virtual categories, which are also
useful.  We inherited the categories over 10 years ago - at that time,
Walnut Creek used to sell FreeBSD CDs with binary packages on them,
and for ease of use of the maintainer, to say nothing of the
installer's hair and sanity, it grouped related binary packages
together.

To see what they're used for, have a look at the binary package
hierarchy after a number of "make packages".
 
> I don't know what needs to be done to add a new pseudo category. But at 
> least pkglint has to know about it ($allowed_categories).

A strange, and new, requirement, indeed. 

New categories can be added to pkgsrc, but, in order to stop rampant
Balkanisation of pkgsrc itself, we stipulate that there have to be a
reasonable number of packages in order to form a new category. We are
careful not to refine the exact number of packages any further than
that.

Regards,
Alistair