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

Thorsten Leemhuis fedora at leemhuis.info
Sun Sep 21 18:27:01 UTC 2008


On 21.09.2008 18:36, Dennis Gilmore wrote:
> On Saturday 20 September 2008 01:36:25 pm Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
>> I recently created comps.xml files for RPM Fusion. During that a few
>> things around comps.xml got discussed on the RPM Fusion lists(¹).
>> That and a recent change (²) to
>> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/CompsXml
>> made me wonder:
 >>
>> How important is comps.xml to us these days?
>>
>> (Note that I mean Fedora and RPM Fusion with "us" here, as RPM Fusion
>> for things like this just follows the Fedora guidelines)
>>
>> Comps.xml is afaics mainly used in anaconda (and thus indirectly in
>> tools like pungi that rely on anaconda) and yum (if you know what to do)
>> these days; PackageKit afaics doesn't use it much (or does it use
>> comps.xml at all? Will that change?); it just lists everything it finds
>> afaics (correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not using PackageKit much and just
>> use yum directly).

Seems you didn't get what I was up to. Sorry, my fault. Let me try again.

> comps.xml is used by yum when doing group functions also   so "yum 
> groupinstall xfce-desktop"  gets that group info from the comps file.

Sure.

>  its still pretty vital. 

Sure. But it afaics could be a whole lot more "vital" if all packagers 
would use it and would use it in the same way.

> and to get the highest visability to your package  you 
> should be entering it.

Sure. But if you read my mail up to the end you will notice that a good 
bunch of packagers don't care and don't add their packages to comps. I 
want to know if we in Fedora (the project/the distribution) should work 
towards fixing that. That implies a proper policy (which is not really 
clear right now), fixing the current mess where round about one/third of 
our packages (or even more; depends on the way you count) are missing in 
comps.xml and making sure all apps present the data from comps in a 
similar way.

Cu
knurd




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