comps discussion at fudcon and the future

[Josh Boyer]

On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 03:55:06PM -0800, Jesse Keating wrote:
>On Wed, 2009-01-14 at 18:14 -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
>> Actually, the answer is no.
>> 
>> The reason being that the metapkg has Requires on the individual packages,
>> but the individual packages don't have Requires on the metapkg.  So you
>> can still remove individual packages, the "group" will just be broken.  And
>> that's fine, since you just decided you don't want the whole group anyway.
>
>erm, except that the group is a package within your rpmdb, so if you
>tried to remove the individual package, yum/rpm would bark that you're
>breaking your deps.  You'd have to --nodeps it, and then have an
>inconsistent rpmdb.  Or you'd do both.  You'd remove only the group
>metapackage, and the individual package you wish to rid yourself of.
>Then you wouldn't have broken deps, but you also wouldn't gain any
>"group" advantages for that group in the future.

Right.

	yum group-install foo-bar-baz

nets foo, bar, baz, and foo-bar-baz-meta being installed.

	yum remove foo

nets foo, and foo-bar-baz-meta being removed.

The mere fact that you want to remove foo after installing the
foo-bar-baz group means that you no longer want the whole group
installed.  Otherwise yum updates in the future would continue
to insist that you need to have foo installed.

Look, people traditionally suck at grouping packages.  Either
the group is huge (like Gnome), or different people have
different interpretations of what should be in a group.  That
doesn't look like it's going to be magically solved by this
proposed mechanism.

The one thing this has going for it is the thing Seth alluded to
with sub-groups being possible.  That way one could install the
"gnome-core" group and maybe not have to deal with the umpteen
other packages it brings in.

josh