From owner-freebsd-ports Mon May 5 03:57:17 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id DAA18255 for ports-outgoing; Mon, 5 May 1997 03:57:17 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nexis.net (customer-1.ican.net [198.133.36.101]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id DAA18250 for ; Mon, 5 May 1997 03:57:15 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (james@localhost) by nexis.net (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id GAA10070 for ; Mon, 5 May 1997 06:54:52 -0400 (EDT) Date: Mon, 5 May 1997 06:54:52 -0400 (EDT) From: James FitzGibbon To: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Subject: Use of perl5 "virtual" category. Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-ports@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk I just went to check the web index of ports to see the the virtual "perl5" category had been updated yet, and found that it was. I also found that a number of ports were there that didn't seem to make much sense. It seems that the initial add of ports to this category added anything that depended on perl5. When the original discussion came up about the category, I assumed that people were talking about my perl5 modules, and the lack of a separate category being annoying to programmer types. When I first started doing perl5 module ports, I argued with Satoshi to make a new directory for them. In the end, we agreed to put them in their appropriate directories. Over the next few months, a number of people who used to modules for programming expressed displeasure with this - they, like me, knew that they were looking for a perl module, knew it's name, and wanted a quick way to see if it had been ported. For this reason, I thought the perl5 virtual category was a great idea. Take, though, crossfire as an example. Crossfire is a multi-player arcade game for X. It happens to require perl5, and is listed in the perl5 category. Does that really make sense ? It would be like me putting every one of the 800+ ports into lang because "they require some kind of compiler, don't they?" The specific ports that fit this category are : crossfire gwstat mailagent premail wwwstat Thoughts ? -- j.