RFE: General categories cleanup

[cooljeanius (Eric Gallager)]

This was inspired by revisiting ticket #37832 after seeing cal's commit r102355 in irc. The following categories only have a single port in them:

​mercurial: currently only contains hg-forest, could also possibly contain mercurial, py*hgsvn, py*mercurial_keyring, py*hggit, py27-hgsubversion, and tortoisehg

​win32: currently only contains nsis, could also possibly contain ASFRecorder, i386-mingw32*, icoconvert, mystonline-wine, octave-windows, ophcrack, p5*parse-win32registry, pev, png2ico, rdesktop*, wine*, and wxmsw

​wsn: currently only contains nesc, not sure what else it could contain

​squeak: currently only contains squeak, pretty sure that's the only thing it could contain

​lua: currently only used for luash, could also be used for lpeg, lua*, ocaml-lua, prosody, swig-lua, texlive-luatex, toluapp, and wxLua

​ipv6: currently only used for aiccu, could also be used for a lot of other things

​html: currently only used for xml2, could be used for so many other things that it might not be worth it

​emacs: currently only used for po-mode.el, could also be used for auctex, cedet, *.el, ecb, emacs*, erc, ess, jove, lookup, magit, mg, nxml-mode, org-mode*, ProofGeneral, psgml, py*pymacs, slime, tex-whizzytex, vile, xemacs, and zile

Also the "​database" and "​databases" categories should probably be combined with one another. Same thing with the "​ml" and "​ocaml" categories.

(Note: All "*"s in the above are wildcards)

[cooljeanius (Eric Gallager)]

oops forgot to set this to "enhancement" instead of "defect"

Edit: I probably should have cc-ed cal, too, since I mentioned him in the OP

[seanfarley (Sean Farley)]

I'm working on the mercurial ones as we speak.

[seanfarley (Sean Farley)]

Up next (hopefully later today) will be the emacs ones.

[cooljeanius (Eric Gallager)]

Thanks sean!

[larryv (Lawrence Velázquez)]

Please remember to obtain permission before changing ports that are not {no,open}maintainer.

[seanfarley (Sean Farley)]

Replying to larryv@…:

Please remember to obtain permission before changing ports that are not {no,open}maintainer.

Sure, I wouldn't want to step on any toes.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Replying to egall@…:

Also the "​database" and "​databases" categories should probably be combined with one another. Same thing with the "​ml" and "​ocaml" categories.

The folder name is "databases"; the 8 ports having category "database" are a mistake and it should be fixed; no need to consult maintainers IMO as it's obviously a mistake, and they're all openmaintainer anyway.

Any category having only a couple ports in it is probably not needed and should be removed.

We have categories for individual pieces of software (perl, python, ruby, php, etc.) when there will be tons of modules for that piece of software; otherwise a category for a specific software program seems to be unnecessary.

[seanfarley (Sean Farley)]

Replying to ryandesign@…:

Replying to egall@…:

Also the "​database" and "​databases" categories should probably be combined with one another. Same thing with the "​ml" and "​ocaml" categories.

The folder name is "databases"; the 8 ports having category "database" are a mistake and it should be fixed; no need to consult maintainers IMO as it's obviously a mistake, and they're all openmaintainer anyway.

Any category having only a couple ports in it is probably not needed and should be removed.

We have categories for individual pieces of software (perl, python, ruby, php, etc.) when there will be tons of modules for that piece of software; otherwise a category for a specific software program seems to be unnecessary.

Good point. I was leaning towards that viewpoint as well since it would simplify 'categories'. I don't currently see much value in each program (e.g. mercurial, emacs, etc) having its own category just for a handful of ports.

[larryv (Lawrence Velázquez)]

Replying to ryandesign@…:

The folder name is "databases"; the 8 ports having category "database" are a mistake and it should be fixed; no need to consult maintainers IMO as it's obviously a mistake, and they're all openmaintainer anyway.

Fixed in r102404.

[larryv (Lawrence Velázquez)]

Replying to egall@…:

​squeak: currently only contains squeak, pretty sure that's the only thing it could contain

Removed in r102405.

[cooljeanius (Eric Gallager)]

I see ryandesign's been working on this lately...

[larryv (Lawrence Velázquez)]

Removed “scheme” from nomaintainer and openmaintainer ports in r106545.

[mf2k (Frank Schima)]

Cc Me!

[cooljeanius (Eric Gallager)]

For cross-referencing purposes, see further discussion of this (regarding the "chemistry" category) at comment:ticket:39732:2

[c.herbig@…]

Just to throw in my two cents, there also seem to be some categories that could cross reference more than what they have. For example, Katomic could probably be exposed in the Education category as well. The reason I say this is that simply trying to browse through Gnome or KDE4, you get flooded with all sorts of ports and libraries that it gets easy to miss something that might be what you were looking for; who wants to browse through 7+ pages of ports. Granted, this is probably just as much the fault of port maintainers choosing poor short descriptions and/or long_descriptions that don't really tell anything useful about the port.

To summarize, as an outsider looking in, there doesn't seem to be any sort of clear strategy for port categorization, description or discovery.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Replying to c.herbig@…:

To summarize, as an outsider looking in, there doesn't seem to be any sort of clear strategy for port categorization, description or discovery.

As a manager, I would agree that we have no such strategy. Port maintainers should of course strive to write good descriptions for their ports, but I myself am certainly guilty of writing more than a few unhelpful port descriptions.

[cooljeanius (Eric Gallager)]

aiccu's "ipv6" category was removed in r118245

[mf2k (Frank Schima)]

Removed emacs category from po-mode.el in r118346. No other port uses the emacs category.

[mf2k (Frank Schima)]

Removed lua category from luash in r118347. No other port uses the lua category.

[mf2k (Frank Schima)]

Changed ocaml to ml in ocaml-bitstring, ocaml-ocamldbi and ocaml-pgocaml in r118348. And for patoline in r118349.

I believe this ticket is now closed.