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

[Matthias Clasen]

On Mon, 2008-09-22 at 15:21 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-09-22 at 21:43 +0100, Richard Hughes wrote:
> > No. PK groups are made up _from_ the comps groups. There are just an
> > order of magnitude less options, and it's a flat list rather than a
> > tree. Comps supports optional, mandatory, suggested and the sort of
> > power user stuff that I just don't want to support in PackageKit.
> 
> Well that's just too damn bad.  You're making things /worse/ by having a
> different view of things post-install than you had during install.  This
> was one of the /best/ things about pirut is that you got the same
> familiar UI, whether that UI was good or bad didn't matter, it was
> the /same/ and /consistent/.
> 
> > 
> > For me to "clean up the groups" would be to rip out all optional groups,
> > rip out most of the obscure categories and add lots of packages with
> > lots of extra deps. I'm sure that's not what you want me to do with
> > comps at all.
> 
> Well it'd certainly be a starting point for a conversation, which is
> much better than decisions being made about our distribution and what
> our users see in our distribution discussed and made somewhere that
> was /not/ our distribution.  Hurting, not helping.
> 
> > If you want to actually help with this stuff, can I suggest you join the
> > PackageKit mailing list and discuss there? Fedora isn't the only
> > consumer of PackageKit, and I'm keen on working upstream on ideas and
> > policies with other distros rather than just defending decisions made
> > upstream that affect fedora.
> 
> If I'd known that upstream was actively looking to destroy our package
> classifications, rather than actually work with us to clean them up a
> bit maybe I would have joined the conversation.  A heads up might have
> been in order.  I fear that any conversation now will just be too little
> too late.
> 
> > And just correcting you: this wasn't _my_ decision, this was the result
> > of working with lots of other distros. Sarcasm doesn't help anybody.
> 
> Neither does letting other distributions make decisions about ours.


Thanks Jesse, for making it clear that you are more interested in
confrontation than a constructive discussion impossible. 

People who are interested in improving PackageKit should probably take
the discussion to the packagekit list (packagekit at lists.freedesktop.org)