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

[Kevin Kofler]

Richard Hughes <hughsient <at> gmail.com> writes:
> On Mon, 2008-09-22 at 11:20 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote:
> > What's your definition of "us"?  Showing the users one set of package
> > information during install, and then a completely different one after
> > install is not suitable either.
> 
> Surely with a live CD we don't show the user any sets of groups at all?

But that's not the only way to install Fedora.

> > Is "not suitable for us" supposed to mean that PK is trying to hard to
> > be generic across the distros so that we lose the classifications and
> > groupings we work on in Fedora, so that PK is not suitable for Fedora?
> 
> No, we keep the groupings as the yum backend supports them as part of
> "collections". I'm just not showing the giant tree of arbitrary
> classifications as the main point of user interaction.

Those "arbitrary" classifications are what Fedora maintainers work hard to keep 
up to date and complete, unlike your incomplete hardcoded classifications in 
PackageKit which are truly arbitrary and do not reflect how Fedora intends to 
categorize its packages.

It doesn't make sense to have distro-independent categories of packages, 
categories are defined by the distributions, they should be read from the 
appropriate distro-specific classification by the PackageKit backend. For 
example, does it make sense to show a KDE resp. GNOME category for a 
distribution which doesn't even ship KDE resp. GNOME, maybe with a single 
package (think of a GNOME distribution shipping e.g. Amarok or K3b as its only 
KDE app)? And distributions with more packages will necessarily have more 
categories! Fedora has many packages, PackageKit's categories don't even come 
close to covering all of them.

        Kevin Kofler