comps discussion at fudcon and the future

[James Antill]

On Fri, 2009-01-16 at 02:36 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> seth vidal wrote:
> > Which is why we can do groups of groups and more precisely break them
> > down into smaller sections. so you install what you need, not the whole
> > world.
> 
> That sounds reasonable, but I'm not sure it's going to scale. If we end up
> with one group per package, we're failing.

 Due to the fact comps won't be tied to a UI it really doesn't matter
how many groups there are, one per. source package is probably more than
is needed though.

> > I suspect most users never know what comps is and they do all their
> > discovery by doing:
> > yum search someword
> > or
> > yum list somepkgnametheyknow
> 
> You think most people don't use the GUIs?

 He's claiming, correctly, that are std. GUI packaging tool doesn't use
comps. by default and no normal user will know how to turn it on. And
further that there has been no movement to try and make it usable within
a GUI for the last couple of years, in fact quite the opposite.
 So from the GUI point of view comps doesn't exist. And browsing from
the cmd line is not done by using grouplist/groupinfo.

 So we can make the solution a lot easier by not trying to "solve" a
problem that isn't going to use the solution no matter what we do.

 And without any historical knowledge people expect "groupinstall blah"
to install a group object called "blah" that will continue to exist
after the command is run ... hence the proposed solution.

-- 
James Antill <james at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora