rpm groups and fedora: a modest proposal

Jeff Spaleta jspaleta at gmail.com
Wed May 26 14:54:17 UTC 2004


On Wed, 26 May 2004 16:34:29 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot
<nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net> wrote:
> Hence you need a hint+policy system, so packagers can provide hints and
> you decide what to do with them.

I still dont see the NEED for internal package level hinting.
All the internal package level hinting can do is give you a very gross grouping
package foo belows to group bar.  It can't define flexible nested
groupings like comps.xml can...so if group bar can ask for group
bar-base to be installed when group bar is asked for. At best you can
pretend the groups tag give you some sort of linear grouping
tree...but if you have a need to list a package in multiple groups,
yer screwed. I certaintly would like to be able to see grouping
definitions get to the point where users can browse for packages like
I can browse for projects through freshmeat. With a mature comps.xml
system I could do something like that easily..I could browse by
function or i could browse by desktop environment
or intended audience becuase the comps.xml is flexible enough to allow
packages to exist in multiple parallel groupings.

Personally I think all package level hinting does is get in the way
because it doesn't provide enough contextual information to be useful
for anything.
I can't think of a single thing I can do with correct per package
group tag, that I can't do with a correct set of comps.xml files and
tools that support browsing by comps.xml defined groupings.


-jef





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