Re: multiple categories

[Peter Simons]

Guido Draheim writes:

 > [macros in more than one category]

I'm sorry, but I honestly don't see your point. You say:

 > I do think that pretty soon the autoconf macro archive will be
 > filled with lots and lots of specific macros. [...]

 > Therefore, I do expect that people will look into just one or
 > two category areas [...].

 > Therefore, to make it easier to find a good macro, it would be good
 > to see it reference it all categories that the archive maintainers
 > thinks it is good and would be right on topic.

The "therefore" suggests that one argument logically implies the next,
but I cannot make that connection. Putting a macro into multiple
categories will make the archive _more_ ambiguous, not less. 

I feel that what you're trying to achieve -- making it easier to find
a macro in the archive -- is not served by this measure. IMHO, the way
to go would be to add a search engine. You're looking for a macro that
tests the types of the socket(2) call arguments? Look for "socket".
Wondering whether the type foo_t is available in the system headers?
Search for foo_t ... That is much simpler.

Furthermore, this is also an argument _against_ splitting up the macro
index into several pages. In the current archive, you can use your
browsers' "find" function to search to _all_ macro names, whereas
splitting them into multiple pages will prevent that.

Can you give us/me an example of a macro that should go into more than
one category, given the category system we're planning to implement
now?


 >> Using a more fine-grained category system would [make a large
 >> archive user friendlier].

 > but we do not have that much categories, and probably do not _want_
 > to have too many anyway since it is best to make the whole
 > ac-archive "browsable" [...].

Why don't we want to have more categories than planned right now? 

Why would having more categories make the archive less browse-able
instead of more?


 >> [obsolete macros should not appear in their old category]

 > Say that someone says "pick up macro xx from ac-archive's c
 > support", how does that turn out? Same thing for links into the
 > ac-archive from somewhere else - the macro should persist for some
 > time in its original place.

If you look at the on-line archive, you'll find that all available
macros follow this scheme:

    http://www.gnu.org/software/ac-archive/htmldoc/MACRO_NAME.html
    http://www.gnu.org/software/ac-archive/m4source/MACRO_NAME.m4

The path of the macro does not depend on the category it is in. By
changing a macro's category (ie- to "obsolete"), we do not change it's
URL on the server.

Peter