rpm groups and fedora: a modest proposal

Nicolas Mailhot Nicolas.Mailhot at laPoste.net
Fri May 28 13:11:04 UTC 2004


Le ven, 28/05/2004 à 08:23 -0400, seth vidal a écrit :
> > > 
> > > Comps is totally unsuitable since it limits you to whatever packages
> > > where known to the distribution at the time of its release. (ie bye bye
> > > third-party packages).
> > 
> > Seconded, I seriously hate the idea of *having* to edit some xml file just 
> > to place a random rpm into some category. 
> 
> but you'd rather edit a spec file and rebuild an rpm to do it?

Yes.

It's no different than rebuilding to change the license tag for example.
Why so much hate for grouping metadata ? specs are full of tags that
require rebuilding to be changed, and no one is even suggesting to strip
them (at least I would hope so)

I understand the convenience argument from people that have direct admin
access to big package repositories. But if we'd were to take a real poll
there are a lot more package maintainers than repository maintainers,
and I doubt all the packager lowlife (as opposed to the happy few that
move in the rarefied ethereal mists of big repo maintership) would
surrender they ability to freely categorise the packages they choose to
publish.

Unless you advocate a 1-1 mapping between package maintainers and
repository owners, which would be a tad rich coming on a list like
fedora-devel that has still to make its peace with the all the other big
third-party rpm repositories.

Let's be honest, centralizing grouping in a few xml files plays the game
of the core distributions and bigest repositories. The previous post
that actually proposed to dump all packages not installed through
yum/apt in lala-lala land had the merit of being clear and coherent with
Fedora.us past disregard of other packaging efforts.

BTW I could probably play this game via the admin accesses I have at
jpackage. But even in the context of a single reposiry like jpackage is,
this proposal fails to impress me. Not every project is as thoroughly
centralised as Fedora.us - I'd hate to have a grouping file to update
each time I submit a new package to the repository. (and I'm not even
talking about nosrc.rpm management that is still not really covered by
comps.xml)

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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