http://fedoraproject.org/extras/4/i386/repodata/

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 7/9/05, Sindre Pedersen Bjordal <foolish at fedoraforum.org> wrote:
> I was under the impression that groups are there to allow the user to
> easily install software that are used together (through groupinstall).
> Software groups such as XCFE or Gnome desktop makes sense.

The groups can do more than that.
Package definitions inside a group can have default,manadatory and
optional settings.
go back and look at things like the Editors group from Core.  Those
items aren't all directly
related.

yum --disablerepo=extras-development groupinfo "Editors"
...
Group: Editors
 Required Groups:
   Base
 Optional Metapkgs:   <----- Optional
   Emacs
 Default Packages:
   vim-enhanced  
 Optional Packages   <---- Optional
   joe
   vim-X11

If you groupinstall with yum you dont get the optional items.
But the optional items show up in the ui for system-config-packages.
I realize that s-c-p is a dead end... but my point is any tool that
replaces s-c-p can have access to the same optional group members as
before through interaction with yum.
You can use groups to hold optional packages that a basic groupinstall
doesn't drag in, and Core is already doing this.

None of the end-user facing tools uses the GROUP tag in the rpm header
for anything useful. All the tools that attempt to "group" items pull
the grouping info from comps. If extras is going to have groupings it
needs to be done via comps to make sure the tools users are using see
exactly what repoview sees.

-jef