[Aptitude-devel] Bug#686646: aptitude: Invisible hierachy or improperly ordered package sets in categorical browser

[Axel Beckert]

Hi Daniel,

Daniel Hartwig wrote:
> On 4 September 2012 17:56, Axel Beckert <abe at debian.org> wrote:
> > I suspect these are packages which just belong to a higher
> > category without belonging to any of their subcategories.
> 
> Looking in /usr/share/aptitude/function_pkgs I can see that this is
> true.  Probably not the best way to display these packages but I
> suspect it has been this way for a long time.

Yeah, I suspect that, too. Until that recent bug report about that
view segfaulting in relation to multiarch, I didn't even notice that
there is a second such view besides the debtags based one. I also was
quite surprised about the source of the categories (i.e. the fact that
it's the above mentioned file which is part of aptitude).

BTW, is /usr/share/aptitude/function_groups also the source for the
archive section descriptions in the default view?

> > I though wonder, why they don't always show up behind the last
> > subcategory, but sometimes also behind some intermediate
> > subcategory.
> 
> I scanned through a few but did not find any like that. Can you
> point out some?

My first example (both, opened and collapsed) is a case where it's
added to a subcategory in the middle (the second out of five or so), I
just haven't listed the next subcategory because the package list
would have been too long.

The second example was a case where it has been added behind the last
subcategory. I pasted the category after it, too.

> Given that debtags browser is available and includes more up-to-date
> information I think this categorical browser can be deprecated,

IMHO not even can, but actually should!

The fact that these categories are more less hardcoded into aptitude
(as package), maintaining them would be doubling the work which has
been put into debtags. It also would mean that someone with commit
access has to keep them uptodate with what's in the archive. That's a
sisyphean task which is better crowd-sourced (i.e. we better use
debtags instead :-)

> to be removed later. There may be some admins with custom
> hierarchies, though I believe debtags will support that also.

I guess, it's time for yet another "aptitude clean up ahead" blog
posting. :-)

		Regards, Axel
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