How important is comps.xml to us these days? Which packages should be in comps.xml and which not?

[Toshio Kuratomi]

Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> On 22.09.2008 08:49, Alex Lancaster wrote:
>> Ideally this would be done either as a mandatory part of the original
>> CVS import request (a field could be added, with an opt-out provision
>> if really not appropriate for comps), or added interactively by the
>> maintainer via PackageDB as I suggested in the feature request here:
>> https://fedorahosted.org/packagedb/ticket/78#comment:1
> 
> Hmmmm. How much does the pkgdb know about the binary packages that get
> build from the source packages? Not much afaics, as the pkgdb mainly
> (only?) works with the (source) packages and not the ones that get build
> from it -- but in a proper comps.xml we need to list the binary
> packages, as a user might want to select the packages (rpms) foo or bar
> that both might get build from the package (srpm) foobar.
> 
>> Having to manually update the comps.xml file for multiple releases is
>> painful, error-prone and probably why most package maintainers ignore
>> it, especially since it is not enforced in package reviews.
> 
+1

So here's where I'm at WRT binary packages.

We have too many apps interested in doing only a subset of the work in
this area.

There's amber which is going to provide an end user view of applications
(rather than packages) with categories and tags.  There's Fedora
collection which probably won't have a permanent data store of its own.
 There's PackageDB which oculd be expanded to handle this (it has tables
for binary packages but is unfilled with data).  There's koji which
touches every binary package, consumes and generates comps files.
There's comps.xml which is the master store for this information right
now.  There's repoview which provides a static interface to binary
packages and comps on the gold repo but not yet updates -- if it is
updated to work on updates, that will require bodhi to write out the files.

So:

1) In which app should the canonical storage for this reside?
2) What interface do we want to put on top of the storage?
3) What apps will need to pull data from there once we have it?

-Toshio

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