suggestions for ports screening

[Edwin Groothuis]

On Sat, Nov 10, 2007 at 10:36:45PM -0500, Chuck Robey wrote:
> An example?  If a programmer asks you if you want the blotz program (I 
> make up great fake names, don't I?) hows the user going to know the the 
> blotz program is a particular sound program, when they have no sound card?

When I search for a certain program with some capabilities, I go
through the INDEX file (/usr/ports/INDEX) or I go to freshmeat or
freshports and do a search there. If I don't see "blotz" there, I'm
not interested in it.

> OK, My suggestion is for a two level system (yes, some of you are going 
> to recognize some of this from other OSes.  G'wan, brag about it).  The 
> first part is a small list of keywords (well, not terribly small, maybe 
> 100-200 of them, but most user's personal lists would be far shorter). 
> These words are descriptive of the sort of machine environment the user 
> wants, like, they might have the words SOUND, FMRADIO and TELEVISION to 
> show that they care to have those sort of dependencies built.  All ports 
> would be required to export a list of words that they check for, before 
> they  build.  If a browser sees no SOUND word, it requires to sound 
> dependencies be built.  Let me repeat this to get it clearly: the words 
> are used to qualify the dependcency lists, but if a particular port is 
> chosen, then it gets built, period.  If a user asks for that sound 
> program explicitly, then it gets built, SOUND word or no SOUND word. 
> It's the dependency lists that have to check and modify themselves.

This sounds like the ports-tag project started by tobez@ a long
time ago: http://www.tobez.org/port-tags/. Not sure what the current
status is.

Edwin

-- 
Edwin Groothuis      |            Personal website: http://www.mavetju.org
edwin at mavetju.org    |              Weblog: http://www.mavetju.org/weblog/