# Port Discoverability



## CreativeGPX (Jan 31, 2014)

Has there been any interest in improving the discoverability of ports? The current system seems well suited to looking for something you already know about (i.e. KDE or gcc) but I found it really difficult to discover new things. For example, if you click the "games" category in the web interface, you get a list of 1218 items. First of all, from the looks of it, these could be broken up into one category for engines and utilities and one for actual games. Second, games could be broken up into a lot of categories to make it easier to find something you are interested in. Instead you have to look through massive lists of sometimes cryptic titles with extremely brief descriptions that mixes popular and unpopular, mature and immature, standalones and dependencies in huge categories. The layout even makes it difficult to flip through them all quickly because each description is a different size. It's a shame because I feel like a lot of high quality ports are being hidden away, drowned out by the massive lists they are a part of.

To me as somebody who has come to FreeBSD from a variety of other platforms the thing that has (correctly or not) stood out is the strong, cohesive community. Yet, the ports interface seems to not capitalize on that for discoverability at all. Some relatively easy things that I think could really improve the discoverability of ports are:

1) Ratings and/or Reviews: Allow people to indicate software they like or dislike (+1, like, thumbs up or down, rate out of 5 stars, etc). When I look up a port now, I can't see beside it whether everybody loves it or whether it has caused people a lot of trouble. Not only is that helpful, but it's helpful to have that be FreeBSD-specific because some issues and irregularities may be specific to the port, not the broader software project from which it derives.

2) Tips, Question & Answer: Let users post questions, answers and tips at the port's page rather than having to go to the forums or mailing list, a new user could see the whole history of problems, solutions and creative usage ideas related to a port right with that port's page. That's as it should be since when you are selecting which of many similar ports to use that is often the information that will make the difference. Now, for each port they view, they would have to look that port up on other sources like the forum to find out things that have been said about it. This just doesn't work well for the "browsing and discovery" use case when you might have many ports to look through. Why not have "how to" posts on this forum registered/tagged in such a way that they show up on the web page of the the port(s) they involve?

3) Popularity: I suppose it'd be a bit controversial for people to be forced to report what they have installed to the central authority. However, at the very least, the pkg server could tally up the amount of download requests it gets. Knowing the popularity can be a helpful indicator too. Even if just to know that if something goes wrong there are lots of other people familiar with the port that you can talk to.

5) More Tagging and Categorization: Being able to have the developers or users give more detailed tagging information would be great. As I said in the example in the beginning where browsing for a game involves looking through a list of 1218 items or knowing an exact search term. For example, it seems like it'd be enormously helpful to be able to search between command-line only, gui or both. I believe there is a category for "audio" and a category for "multimedia" but there isn't a category for "media player" or "synthesizers and samplers". That would help avoid the case I mentioned where I'd have to look through 1218 results.

So, is there any receptiveness from the FreeBSD community to have something like this? Is there a reason it's not there? Is there a reason it shouldn't or couldn't be there? I would certainly be willing to put in the work to put something like that together but I think I would need the cooperation and compliance of others.


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## SirDice (Feb 1, 2014)

You might want to talk to the maintainer of http://www.freshports.org he may be interested.


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