rpm groups and fedora: a modest proposal

Nicolas Mailhot Nicolas.Mailhot at laPoste.net
Wed May 26 15:32:18 UTC 2004


Le mer, 26/05/2004 à 08:16 -0400, Jeff Spaleta a écrit :
> On Wed, 26 May 2004 11:02:36 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot
> <nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net> wrote:
> > Any setup that does not allow in-package hints, distro policy and local
> > sysadmin overlay will f*-up one of these people.
> 
> Have you not been listening to seth?
> yum can merge group definitions from multiple sources. I'm really not
> convinced you NEED in package group tags, just like i don't think you
> NEED in package recommend tags. You publish packages in a repo

And this is where you didn't listen to me.
All the world is not a yum repo.
Right now yum is an *optional* rpm overlay.
If you make yum mandatory for something as trivial as rpm classification
you kill a lot of rpm's interest.

How do you handle single-rpm publication on sf on your setup ? How do
you handle rpm -Uvh http://foo.org/bar.rpm ? How do you handle using a
CD of unindexed rpms as a yum source ?

Are you seriously suggesting someone needs all the repository plumbing
just to declare a package is a game, a gnome applet or whatever ? Why
not get all the metadata out of spec files while you're at this ?

The group tag is broken mostly because it is 
1. mono-valuated
2. not standardised
3. interpreted as-is instead of getting through even the dumbest
filter/formatter

Frankly nothing I've read so far justifies moving this info out of the
spec files and making yum an hard requirement. Changing the
format/allowed values yes. Changing the way it is parsed/interpreted
yes.  Moving it out ? No.

You have to give a lot more compelling arguments than "it works better
than foo known-broken-for-ages setup" to sell something that goes
against package=standalone software unit rule.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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