5.3 Categorization

5.3.1 CATEGORIES

When a package is created, it is put under /usr/ports/packages/All and links are made from one or more subdirectories of /usr/ports/packages. The names of these subdirectories are specified by the variable CATEGORIES. It is intended to make life easier for the user when he is wading through the pile of packages on the FTP site or the CDROM. Please take a look at the current list of categories and pick the ones that are suitable for your port.

This list also determines where in the ports tree the port is imported. If you put more than one category here, it is assumed that the port files will be put in the subdirectory with the name in the first category. See below for more discussion about how to pick the right categories.

5.3.2 Current list of categories

Here is the current list of port categories. Those marked with an asterisk (*) are virtual categories--those that do not have a corresponding subdirectory in the ports tree. They are only used as secondary categories, and only for search purposes.

5.3.3 Choosing the right category

As many of the categories overlap, you often have to choose which of the categories should be the primary category of your port. There are several rules that govern this issue. Here is the list of priorities, in decreasing order of precedence:

• The first category must be a physical category (see above). This is necessary to make the packaging work. Virtual categories and physical categories may be intermixed after that.

• Language specific categories always come first. For example, if your port installs Japanese X11 fonts, then your CATEGORIES line would read japanese x11-fonts.

• Specific categories are listed before less-specific ones. For instance, an HTML editor should be listed as www editors, not the other way around. Also, you should not list net when the port belongs to any of irc, mail, mbone, news, security, or www, as net is included implicitly.

• x11 is used as a secondary category only when the primary category is a natural language. In particular, you should not put x11 in the category line for X applications.

• Emacs modes should be placed in the same ports category as the application supported by the mode, not in editors. For example, an Emacs mode to edit source files of some programming language should go into lang.

• misc should not appear with any other non-virtual category. If you have misc with something else in your CATEGORIES line, that means you can safely delete misc and just put the port in that other subdirectory!

• If your port truly does not belong anywhere else, put it in misc.

If you are not sure about the category, please put a comment to that effect in your send-pr(1) submission so we can discuss it before we import it. If you are a committer, send a note to the FreeBSD ports mailing list so we can discuss it first. Too often, new ports are imported to the wrong category only to be moved right away. This causes unnecessary and undesirable bloat in the master source repository.

5.3.4 Proposing a new category

As the Ports Collection has grown over time, various new categories have been introduced. New categories can either be virtual categories--those that do not have a corresponding subdirectory in the ports tree-- or physical categories--those that do. The following text discusses the issues involved in creating a new physical category so that you can understand them before you propose one.

Our existing practice has been to avoid creating a new physical category unless either a large number of ports would logically belong to it, or the ports that would belong to it are a logically distinct group that is of limited general interest (for instance, categories related to spoken human languages), or preferably both.

The rationale for this is that such a change creates a fair amount of work for both the committers and also for all users who track changes to the Ports Collection. In addition, proposed category changes just naturally seem to attract controversy. (Perhaps this is because there is no clear consensus on when a category is ``too big'', nor whether categories should lend themselves to browsing (and thus what number of categories would be an ideal number), and so forth.)

Here is the procedure:

Proposing a new virtual category should be similar to the above but much less involved, since no ports will actually have to move. In this case, the only patches to include in the PR would be those to add the new category to the CATEGORIESs of the affected ports.

5.3.5 Proposing reorganizing all the categories

Occasionally someone proposes reorganizing the categories with either a 2-level structure, or some other kind of keyword structure. To date, nothing has come of any of these proposals because, while they are very easy to make, the effort involved to retrofit the entire existing ports collection with any kind of reorganization is daunting to say the very least. Please read the history of these proposals in the mailing list archives before you post this idea; furthermore, you should be prepared to be challenged to offer a working prototype.