[pacman-dev] A proposition for an enhancement - addition of category info to .PKGINFO

[Bozhidar Batsov]

ngaba at petra.hos.u-szeged.hu wrote:
> I may misunderstood you, but groups are ideal for doing this.
> Bye, ngaba
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Not at all. Suppose say that all the text editors where in a group
called editors. Then pacman -S editors would have installed all of them,
and I very much doubt the possibility that anyone will ever need every
available editor. The categories on the other hand are only a way of
grouping packages for easier searching/browsing through them. This
becomes especially valuable when you need a package from a certain
category, but you are not acquainted with all of the possible options.
Say you need a video player but you're new to the world of GNU/Linux.
You haven't heard of mplayer, xine, vlc. But if there is category
multimedia you just scan the packages in it and try them until you like
some. So I think that a category info would be a most valuable asset to
.PKGINFO and the community itself... The way I see it a package can
belong to several categories at once - for example totem would be in
both multimedia and gnome categories.