On Sun, Aug 10, 2003 at 11:35:31PM -0400, James K. Lowden wrote:
> On Sun, 10 Aug 2003 22:03:12 -0400, Jan Schaumann <jschauma@NetBSD.org>
> wrote:
> > Jaromir Dolecek <jdolecek@NetBSD.org> wrote:
> > 
> > > Jan Schaumann wrote:
> > 
> > > > How about we create a 'java' category? 
> > 
> > > What's wrong with 'lang' ? Adding sun-jre142/sun-jdk142 isn't really
> > > problematic, is it?
> > 
> > No, of course not.  But it seems to me that 'java' should be it's own
> > category.  There are quite a few applications that could belong to such
> > a category which would make it easier for people to find an application.
> 
> It's not clear, is it?  I've often thought the same of Perl and Python
> modules.  On one hand, I normally say to myself, hmm, I bet there's a Perl
> module for that (or, more often, I *know* there's a perl module and wonder
> if it's in pkgsrc).  On the other hand, if I'm looking for some kind of
> XML processor, do I care if it's in Java or Perl or C++?  Not very much,
> or a lot, depending on what I have in mind.  
> 
> On the third hand, I don't understand why the two-level hierarchy gets
> special status.  It would be nicer to be able to look for "perl modules
> that do graphics" (or not).  
> 
> Anyway, Perl dominates much more than Java:
> 
> $ pwd; \
>   for d in [a-z]*; \
> 	do printf "%20s\t%2d\n" $d \
> 		 `ls -d $d/p5* 2>/dev/null |wc -l` ;\
> 	done \
>   |grep -v ' 0'$
> /usr/pkgsrc
>            archivers     2
>                audio     4
>                 chat     4
>                comms     4
>           converters     7
>            databases    19
>                devel    70
>              finance     1
>                fonts     2
>             graphics    10
>                 mail    11
>                 math     8
>                 misc    12
>                  net    17
>             parallel     1
>                print     1
>             security    24
>             sysutils     1
>             textproc    46
>                 time     4
>                  www    36
>                  x11     2

In pkgsrc, we tend to group, for better or worse, on functionality of
the package, rather than the source language in which its written. 
This may prove a hindrance to people who know that there's "something
written like this in Perl", or it may not.  One thing that I have
tried before, and which did help (in another packaging system I wrote
many years ago), was a KEYWORDS definition in package Makefiles, which
included relevant keywords to the package, and on which you could
create an index file (even permuted indices), and searching was much
easier.

I know that you and I have corresponded before about better ways of
searching for packages within pkgsrc, and I also know that, up until
now, the pkgsrc people have not managed to find a better way to search
for things. pkglocate helps, but only in a small way. The recent query
about binary packages on a remote site is also tied into this issue.

Regards,
Alistair