Subject: Re: Adding 'See Also' information to pkgs
To: None <tech-pkg@netbsd.org>
From: Anthony Mallet <anthony.mallet@useless-ficus.net>
List: tech-pkg
Date: 11/27/2001 22:30:24
Frederick Bruckman wrote :
| Are you talking about patching man pages?

No. I was thinking of adding a new 'SEE_ALSO' variable to the packages
makefiles. Basically the same principle as the 'COMMENT' variable.

| how many "see also's" will you have for the window managers?

Hum yes, that might be a bit huge if we reference all window managers
present in pkgsrc. But there's no need to do this. For instance,
WindowMaker could just reference 'AfterStep' as an alternative, because
they are very roughly the same.

But we could have 'gimp' referencing 'xfig' (complementary tasks),
'netscape' referencing 'opera' or 'konqueror' (alternatives), etc...

| -- and from the user's point of view, he's going to see
| "see also's" for man pages he doesn't even have!

No, the idea is to let the user see other packages --- available in the 
pkgsrc tree --- that are alternatives to the package he is considering.


| A more productive endeavor might be to fix the README.html generation to
| make one web page per category, containing a link to every package that
| has that category in it's "${CATEGORIES}". This would allow making
| ad-hoc categories that satisfy particular interests.

That's an interresting thought.
Maybe my idea is just a matter of refining the 'category' field (that is:
adding more descriptive categories).
As of now, if I look in the 'graphics' subdir (I could have taken another
example as well), I'll find a lot of packages that do not the same task
at all: we have image manipulation programs, video viewers, plotters ...

So, which one: A "SEE_ALSO variable" or "more categories" ?
(or none of the above :) ?)