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

Jeff Spaleta jspaleta at gmail.com
Tue Sep 23 17:31:43 UTC 2008


On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 11:45 PM, Richard Hughes <hughsient at gmail.com> wrote:
> You think we NEED a "KDE Software Development group". PackageKit is not
> designed for you. Can you explain how having fine grained groups would
> help people like: http://www.packagekit.org/pk-profiles.html ?
>
> PackageKit is not designed for the sort of users who are comfortable
> using yum on the command line. PackageKit doesn't replace yum, it's just
> complimentary. If we designed PK as a "suitable for any user" tool then
> it would be suitable for no-one. Hence the need for a profiles page.


Can the motivating profiles for PK be extended to include situations
where an instituttion is looking to create its own group definition
for inhouse software for specific desktop users tasking?

For example the medical school that your example medical student goes
to may very well want to give its linux users a centralized way to
access inhouse curriculum software utilities and may feel the best way
to do that is to provide a dedicated grouping in a comps file
definition in its local school package repository.  Will PK grow to
help those institutional users?  Are you asking institutions who are
running local, non-public, repositories to tell their medical student
analogs to drop to the cmdline to install the inhouse software
utilities via yum groupinstall, instead of exposing the institution's
groupings via PK UI?

The best part of comps to me, is the fact that local, non-public,
institutional repositories have the flexibility to define their own
groupings that best meet their situational needs.. without getting
stuck in the god forsaken debate over how a particular distribution
chooses to organize things. For academic institutions like medical
schools, that could end up looking like curriculum or courseware
groupings... grouping concepts we'd never ever need to consider in the
most general case. Can anyone say that's not a valid way to make use
of the flexiblity comps in an institutional setting?  I can't.

-jef"We can probably spend the next several months doing nothing more
but nitpick how we group things in Fedora's comps. Or in fact
nitpicking how anyone defines a group.  I'm sure historians who focus
on brick and mortar library catelog schemes will get a big kick out of
it."spaleta




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