Re: Excessive package interdependency

[seth vidal <skvidal phy duke edu>]

> You also want to remember bundles (or guess them for old setups), so that
> you can say "has gnome" ok now in FC2 gnome has added x and y, stick up a
> "The package groups you have selected have been expanded in this release,
>  shall I also installl..."

I was thinking about this problem some and I've unfortunately come to
the conclusion that tracking group information in some sort of database
might be the only workable solution. Obviously a user could remove all
sorts of packages that comprise a group, but if more and more of the pkg
mgmt tools start to understand groups then maybe people will be more
inclined to deal with them as a group not as individual packages.

I've read and written code for determining if a group (comps.xml group)
is installed or not. 

That being the case it'd be nice if we might be able to write down the
group-is-installed policy now so people doing pkg mgmt and pkg-group
mgmt have a rule to follow.

What I learned from bugging jeremy and from watching how groups got
marked in r-c-p:

a group is installed if: all the mandatory packereqs are installed and
all the metapackages are installed. Group reqs are not consulted.

any comments on maybe having anaconda write out a list of groups that
are marked as installed when it finishes an install?

it'd be handy to know what a user selected group-wise.

-sv