Re: /package registration

[email protected] wrote:
> /package/`md5sum foo-1.0.tar.gz | cut -d' ' -f1`/foo-1.0

That would be strictly worse than either of /package/foo-1.0 or
/package/admin/foo-1.0; each package would be in its own "category",
so /package would not be kept small, and the categories would not be
meaningful.

I think splitting packages into subdirectories is good: if /package
becomes wildly successful, we wouldn't want thousands of packages
directly in /package.  But I agree that the current category scheme is
not the most useful way to split up packages.

Delegation or administrative effort is one of the benefits of a
hierarchical namespace, but (ignoring host/) we throw away some of
that benefit by requiring each package registration to go through Dan
(who's beginning to look less like the bottleneck and more like the
cork these days).  It makes sense to delegate subdirectories of
/package to authors; it makes less sense to require authors to
register domain names to get a /package delegation.  The .com
namespace is disorganized, but doesn't seem to be less useful as a
result.  The root zone is organized, but doesn't seem to be more
useful as a result.

Dan, I'd like to register /package/prj/ as a prefix for my packages.

> It is easier to maintain a separate database about packages which
> are math or admin related.

Maybe something like:
$ ls foo-1.0/package/categories
admin   daemon  ...


paul