RPMGroups -- time to refresh? [was Re: Question about how to announce packages]

[seth vidal]

On Sun, 2004-08-08 at 19:47 -0400, Michael Tiemann wrote:
> Actually, I think it's an excellent question to ask how things like this
> (and related subjects) should be organized.  I don't think we should be
> stuck with categorizations that were defined, by fiat, 5+ years ago. 
> Much has happened, and a good (better?) characterization tree might be a
> good thing for a near-term version of Fedora.  Eric Raymond has spoken
> that he'd like to present the Trove (http://www.catb.org/~esr/trove/). 
> I for one think it might be useful to find some happy medium between the
> obviously small number of groups defined by
> http://www.fedora.us/wiki/RPMGroups, the large number defined by the
> Trove, those defined implicitly and explicitly by ibiblio, etc.  I don't
> want this to confound the discussion about how Fedora Collections might
> be defined, but I do think that a proper hierarchy of functionality
> would help both the archivists, collectors, and applicators of open
> source technologies.

I think for the purposes of core and to some extent for collections w/i
extras we'll need some way of describing groups comprised of specific
packages. This is what comps.xml has done for a while for rhl/fc but
comps needs to be freshened up a bit to include:
 - archs (sorry jeremy)
 - possibly partial or complete versions
 - more granularity of group requirement

This is part of the discussion we've had wrt to the xml metadata for rpm
repositories.

This works not from w/i the package but from the outisde, of course, and
it would allow a per-repository basis to describe groups of packages.
-sv