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

[Chris Ricker]

On Thu, 14 Jul 2005, Matthew Miller wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 14, 2005 at 01:29:34PM -0400, Chris Ricker wrote:
> > > Well, since the current group tag is already Forever More Needed, we might
> > > as well reuse it for this.
> > If it goes in the spec at all, sure. But is Group abusable to get multiple 
> > tags? And if you're having to make changes to get Group usable, why not 
> > just kill it instead?
> 
> You don't have to make changes -- you can put pretty much any arbitrary
> string there.

Right, but what rpm tools, scripts, etc. out there in the wild that assume 
they'll never see a "," in Group: will your string with a "," in it break? 
(or whatever you use as a tag separator. My vote is for "!@&" ;-)

Moving from the defined list in GROUPS to anything else, particularly some 
multi-fielded delimited string, is a change that will likely break 
something. rpm's the kind of tool that has huge wads of crufty shell 
scripts and similar built around scraping its output

> > retrofitting's needed in the sense of something has to have a tag to be 
> > categorizable. So if the tag is within the rpm, all the existing rpms 
> > either need a rebuild (not going to happen, except perhaps for the sphere 
> > of Fedora) or you have to fall back to the existing meaningless Group tag
> 
> Yeah; the existing groups could be recogized by the way they contain a "/"
> and dealt with as legacy. Or, maybe it wouldn't be considered a tag unless
> there's more than one separated by a ",". Or just let 'em be tags that would
> generally be ignored. So many possibilities. :)

See above

> > But Some Central File has to change anyway every time packages change, are 
> > added, etc. That's a solved problem....
> 
> How so? You mean the yum repo metadata? That's automatically generated from
> info in the RPMs themselves....

No, I meant how the whole Fedora infrastructure works makes insertion of 
tags in Some Central File feasible. For example, right now when you want 
to request a new build you cd to the cvs co of your rpm and type make 
build. Behind the scenes that edits Some Central File (common/tobuild in 
this case) which tracks what needs to be built....

There's no conceptual reason there can't be a common/comps-fe.xml that 
make rpmtag edits (or whatever -- it just can't be make tag 'cause that's 
already taken for CVS tagging. My vote would be just for a shared edited 
file without even fooling with make), and a similar file for the other 
repositories

later,
chris