Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 21:34:46 -0500 (EST) From: John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu> To: Chuck Robey <chuckr@glue.umd.edu> Cc: CVS-committers@freefall.freebsd.org, cvs-all@freefall.freebsd.org, cvs-ports@freefall.freebsd.org Subject: Re: cvs commit: ports/www/sawt - Imported sources Message-ID: <Pine.BSI.3.95.970202203402.17748F-100000@fallout.campusview.indiana.edu> In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.3.95q.970202191204.6496B-100000@fiber.eng.umd.edu>
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On Sun, 2 Feb 1997, Chuck Robey wrote: > On Sun, 2 Feb 1997, John Fieber wrote: > > Out of curiosity, why is this in www? > > It's a library for applications dealing *only* with the web. Well, maybe > you could get it to work without the web, actually, but that's the > intention. It works with, say, kaffe. Huh?! Well, I guess those non-web AWT applications I've been fiddling with must be hallucinations since apparently AWT is *only* for the web. :) Seriously, this is just as silly as putting SP in print because it could potentially be used in the context of printing, never mind that SP *itself* has absolutely nothing to do with printing. Given the constraints of the existing classification system I would have put it in devel. It may not be optimal, but AWT is a windowing API that *can* be used in a web environment, not a windowing API *for* a web environment. If this particular AWT implementation has special web-only restrictions, why is that not mentioned anywhere in the port comment or description? Maybe I'm a bit hypersensitive to sloppy classification but the ports collection is getting big enough that it becomes quite cumbersome to wander around looking for misfiled ports. Currently we have an uncomfortable mix of classification based on "what it is" and "what it is used for". While the latter seems like it would be useful on the surface, it quickly degenerates into a useless mess when you try and scale it up, or artificats with open-ended uses enter the picture. It is easy to define what Java is (a programming language) but impossible to exhaustively define what it is used for. WWW? Games? GUI development? Database? None of these are wrong, but where do you draw the line? The only sane thing to do from a classification standpoint is to fall back to intrinsic qualities of the artifiact in question: Java is a programming language. SAWT is a windowing API implementation. The closest thing we have to that is devel. Okay, I'll shut up now. :) -john
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