Re: attn: which, bzip2,gzip maintainers (was Re: some problems with setup.ini)

["Robert Collins" <robert dot collins at itdomain dot com dot au>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Christopher Faylor" <cgf@redhat.com>
>
> >> And, IMHO, bzip2 gzip unzip zip are all similar enough
> >> to be in the same category. Or not.
> >
> >Agreed. Shall we get rid of the separate archivers category?
>
> I like the archivers category.  I don't think it detracts to
> have it.  However, as Earnie points out, neither gzip or bzip2
> are really archivers.

and we do have a few archives - (pk) zip, mt, sharutils, tar, ar.

> I really don't have a problem with both generic and specific
categories.
> I guess I could easily imagine massive cygwin mailing list confusion
> if someone selected unzip in the "Archivers" category and then
> found that it was automatically selected in the "Utils" category but
> it would be sort of interesting to see if this kind of classification
> helped or hurt.

I'm easy here, but I would like to see consistency, with all the
archiving packages added to archivers, or it gone.

> Hmm.  Maybe this is an argument for either "metapackages" or some kind
> of way to order the presentation of categories.  It might make sense
> to provide the general purpose categories first, followed by the more
> specific ones.  So, the screen would like like this:
>
> Or, having a hierarchy (doesn't Debian do this?) might even be better:
>
> Utils
>   Archivers
>     zip
>     tar


Debian has several different metrics for a package.
>From memory:
1) distribution - stable testing unstable - which I mentally map to our
prev/curr/testing
2) Priority - optional low medium high important critical required
3) Section - X11/utils/development/base/

So for example, man-db is "important" "documentation"
ftp is "standard" "base"

This allows some auto-selection of new packages. (I don't know if debian
does this but it could). I.e. packages in any category that you have one
or more packages installed from are autoselected IFF their priority is >
standard.

> The only problem with that is that it wastes screen real estate.

Not really an issue once I get the resizeable dialog going, and it's not
really an issue now with the categories expanding.

Rob