Porters Handbook: choosing the right category

Mike Brown mike at skew.org
Wed Jun 30 08:13:43 UTC 2004


[posted to freebsd-ports on Jun 22; no answer there, so posting here,
 if for no other reason than to point out a need for clarification in
 the Porters Handbook]

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/makefile-categories.html
In section 5.3.3, the Porters Handbook says, under "Choosing the right category",

"Specific categories win over less-specific ones. For instance, an HTML editor 
should be listed as www editors, not the other way around."

I have no idea what is meant by "win over" in this context. Does the winner 
come first or last? It's not really clear to me that 'www' is any more or less 
specific than 'editors'. Editors seems like a broad category that you could 
narrow down by constraining it to just those athat apply to the web, and the
software is primarily an editor, so I'd think 'editors' is the more important
category.

The ports I am working on are in 3 categories:

  python, www, textproc

Would that be the right order? Is python more specific than the web? Is text 
processing less specific? It seems like I'm being encouraged to decide which 
tastes more like chicken. here: bicycling, or happiness. And I feel like an 
idiot for not knowing the answer.



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