Re: New package suggestions (haskell, sml, xslide)

Executive summary: I think packages should be split along lines that are convenient for the maintainers of the packages, and pui should do a better job of indexing and grouping them. Very much IMO YMMV. Charles> Creating more packages just adds confusion, IMO. More than that. It allows us to more easily assign maintainers to specific packages, since the work looks smaller. There have been cases where people changed a Makefile and broke an entire collection. Smaller, more cohesive packages make for better distribution of responsibility and reliability. Charles> Prog-modes becomes "support for various programming Charles> languages, except for <X> and <Y> and <Z> which have Charles> their own packages" - just more loose ends for users to Charles> keep track of. This is a design bug in pui, IMO, not a problem of the packaging system itself. Note that in the list-packages display, you do not get a complete list of what's supported in prog-modes. Also, many things that are very like programming modes (PSGML) or are programming modes (JDE) are just too big to put in prog-modes, and have prickly maintainers. So putting everything into prog-modes is a non-starter. Charles> (Why do we have a prog-modes package at all? Why not Charles> just have a separate package for every language mode?) The latter was Steve Baur's intention. However, at that time there were very few "external maintainers". Since he was maintaining it all himself, he grouped related modes, especially those which had no active upstream maintainer, into bunches. -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Don't ask how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.