Re: Emacs cvs newbie problems

[karl@freefriends.org (Karl Berry)]

    Where is this list?

It is in the Texinfo manual.  Since I made up the list at the same time
we added the @dircategory/@direntry feature, I figured it would be
better to get some experience with it before trying to promulgate
anything too widely as a standard.

    Those don't seem like useful categories.  Useful categories relate to
    jobs the user wants to find out how to do.

Well, I think they do.  Here was my thinking: if the user is a
programmer, then they are looking for programming tools, or libraries,
or documentation.  If the user is using emacs, then they might look for
Emacs packages; and if they don't use emacs, they have no interest in
emacs packages.  (Pretend `GNU Emacs Lisp' is just `Emacs', which is
what you actually use.)  If the user is not a programmer, then they're
interested in all the "other" packages.

Since you don't like those, can you give some specific examples of
the broad categories that you would prefer, and how maintainers should
choose categories?

FYI, here is the real list from my system, including numerous categories
from various packages I've installed on my system, such as gettext,
lilypond, and a2ps.  So you can get a sense of what maintainers are
actually doing.  (`Individual utilities' is important; it has an entry
for each program like cp/rm/sort/etc.  This is so people can say "info
cp" or whatever and get something useful.  There's also an entry for the
general manual -- coreutils or whatever.)

GNU Packages
Texinfo documentation system
Printing Tools
GNU programming tools
Emacs
GNU Gettext Utilities
GNU programming support
GNU libraries
GNU programming documentation
GNU organization
GNU music project
TeX
DOS 
Other things
Individual utilities

Any advice gratefully received ...

k