Re: multiple categories

[Peter Simons]

Guido Draheim writes:

 > (a) I do think that pretty soon the autoconf macro archive will be
 >      filled with lots and lots of specific macros. It is not good to
 >      have them presented on a single page and to expect people to
 >      scroll the screen and to read _all_ names and check if they
 >      apply to his problem.

But putting macros into multiple categories will make the list of
macros in each category _longer_, not shorter?

I see your point and I agree that finding macros in the archive might
be problematic. But putting macros into multiple categories IMHO won't
help that. Using a more fine-grained category system would.

Having learned from the Word Wide Web, we should drop the whole
category business anyway and just provide a good search engine. :-)


 >      For example, an obsoleted macro might only exist in the main
 >      index page in the section `obsoleted` but an index page about
 >      `cxx` could still list it but with an extra visual marker
 >      saying `obsoleted` [...]

Isn't prominently listing obsolete macros completely against the point
of making them obsolete in the first place? They don't become obsolete
for nothing. They do only when they have been replaced (in which case
you should use the new one) or when they're known to not work (in
which case you should not use it at all). 


 >      @category Installed Packages, obsoleted

I'd like to postpone that point until we got the point of having
multiple categories per macro at all, OK? If we decide to go for it,
I'll come back to this.

Peter