On Aug 22, 2007, at 11:55, Chris Pickel wrote:
Personally, I would like to see an "Portdirs" (or some such) file added to ports/, containing a list of dirs to search for for portfiles. The current one would be:
aqua/* archivers/* audio/* ... zope/*
and yours would be equivalent to:
a/*/* b/*/* c/*/* ... z/*/*
I think the default should be "*/*" for backwards compatibility, but a Portlist of "*" would provide a prefix-less repository as alluded to later in the thread.
What this buys us is: * We can set up deeper hierarchies; there are plenty of python, perl, &c. ports that are basically "a textproc port for python" and these could be in e.g. "python/textproc". * We can exclude, say "groups" and put the PortGroup files there, allowing us to sync the PortGroups with the ports tree. * Users have flexibility to determine their own organization scheme for their personal repositories, including the prefix-less "*".
I'm bringing this up because I think it's a more flexible modification; I don't personally see the need to change the port hierarchy to alphabetical organization. A GUI tool can organize the tree however's appropriate, and when I want to cd to a port's directory, `cd */mpd` works fine if I don't remember it's 'audio'. Under your scheme I'd just switch to `cd **/mpd`.
I don't think anybody needs this level of customization. I don't think the current layout of the dports dir is broken, so I wouldn't change it.