[DRE-maint] Ruby section

Mon May 28 14:33:52 UTC 2007

Vincent Fourmond dijo [Mon, May 28, 2007 at 11:34:29AM +0200]:
>   Hello dear debian Ruby developpers !
> 
>   If you are interested in having a ruby section (after all, we make
> up nearly half of the interpreter section)  and if you didn't do it
> yet, please second the proposal for the creation of a ruby section
> (bug
> #419261). You'll need to send a signed mail, of course.

Humh... I am not sure - I think the sections structure is not too
useful anyway. I'd rather _join_ back several sections (i.e. Perl,
Python, interpreters) into the one most of them really belong to
(libs/devel/libdevel). When you install a package (as a user), it's
not important to you which language it's written in - And as a
programmer, you will very likely look at the name, which contains that
information. Besides, that's what Debtags is for. The 'sections'
mechanism is IMHO way too limited to be of any real use with such a
big set of packages as we have. Just to illustrate my point: 

gwolf at mosca: ~$ grep -ri ^Section /var/lib/apt/lists/ftp.mx.debian.org_debian_dists_unstable_main_binary-i386_Packages | sort | uniq -c
   1012 Section: web
   1029 Section: doc
    113 Section: otherosfs
     11 Section: embedded
    120 Section: comm
   1228 Section: perl
   1348 Section: net
   1660 Section: devel
   1989 Section: libdevel
    216 Section: science
    247 Section: tex
   2496 Section: libs
    294 Section: editors
     29 Section: shells
    305 Section: math
     36 Section: news
    395 Section: graphics
    397 Section: kde
    400 Section: gnome
    434 Section: interpreters
    511 Section: python
    514 Section: mail
    517 Section: misc
    597 Section: sound
     63 Section: oldlibs
    672 Section: text
     75 Section: electronics
    862 Section: games
    874 Section: admin
     90 Section: hamradio
    969 Section: utils
    978 Section: x11

First of all: Groups with 11 packages, groups with over 2000. Does
that seem comparable? Some groups (i.e. tex) are well defined, but
there is a lot of potential overlap with very subtle distinctions
(i.e. devel/libdevel/libs, perl/net/admin/utils,
perl/python/interpreters, x11/kde/gnome, etc.) 

See you at the Debtags talk at Debconf then ;-) Debtags is already
part of the shown package information - I can only hope it gains
strength (and developer mindshare). I don't think adding a new section
will be of any use.

Greetings,

[ Cc:ing this to debian-devel, as I think that if any discussion
  happens regarding this bug, it needs to be project-wide. FWIW, this
  proposal has 4 seconds already. ]

-- 
Gunnar Wolf - gwolf at gwolf.org - (+52-55)5623-0154 / 1451-2244
PGP key 1024D/8BB527AF 2001-10-23
Fingerprint: 0C79 D2D1 2C4E 9CE4 5973  F800 D80E F35A 8BB5 27AF
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