ports/www is too full

[Benjamin Lutz]

>Ports/www is too full: 755 ports.

There's even worse categories than www:
/usr/ports# for f in `make -V SUBDIR`; do echo -n "$f\t"; ls $f | wc -l; 
done | sort -k 2
[snip dirs with less than 200 entries]
x11-toolkits         211
editors      215
math         249
x11          266
print        270
lang         281
databases            335
japanese             430
misc         441
security             463
audio        471
mail         480
sysutils             511
graphics             526
games        644
textproc             679
www          756
net          796
devel       1404

Why does it matter that some dirs are rather large? Personally I'd rather 
be able to guess where a port resides (which is harder with more 
categories), than to have an "ls /usr/ports/www" fit onto a single 
screen.

There will be 12000 ports soon, imo splitting directories all the time is 
not good solution to the problem you're having (getting to that), nor is 
adding another level of depth in the file system hierarchy (and having 
varying depths is even worse).

Reading between the lines, the problem you're having is that the ports 
aren't well enough categorized at the moment. How about borrowing an idea 
from some of the knowledge databases, and using keywords to mark ports? 
Eg, instead of creating a www-server category, the apache port could be 
marked "server www". linux-opera could be market "binary browser client 
linux www" or something like that.

The number of keywords that exist as well as the number of keywords 
assigned to a single port could then be much more easily changed and 
updated. Of course, there'd need to be a program for filtering the ports 
by keyword, but it'd be trivial to write one or to put this functionality 
into make search.

Just some more ideas from an user :)

Greetings
Benjamin
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 187 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ports/attachments/20041022/bffa8371/attachment.bin