KDE Sub-Packaging Approach on Fedora

[Hugo Cisneiros]

On Tuesday 20 June 2006 09:41, Jonathan Underwood wrote:
> Hi,

Hau

> One part of the proposal that I think should be considered more
> carefully is the strategy of having the main package Require all of
> the subpackages. At first glance, this seems like a good idea,
> allowing the user to install eg. all of kdegames with a yum install
> kdegames, OR just installing game foo, with yum install kdegames-foo.
> BUT, if having dones a yum install kdegames, Joe decides he doesn't
> want foo, he does a yum remove kdegames-foo, and then yum of course
> decides that it's necessary to remove kdegames. That is, if I
> understand the proposal correctly (I may have misunderstood). In
> short, I think this points to a missuse of rpm Requires that shouldn't
> really be encouraged. It probably also points to the need for some
> mechanism in rpm to accomplish what is trying to be achieved here,
> perhaps an Includes: kdegames-foo directive, or somesuch. Or perhaps a
> more finely grained Group - i.e. kdegames as a subgroup.

The kdegames package does require its sub-packages, but the sub-packages does 
*not* require the main package. This is called "meta-packaging". Take a look 
at the specfile and you will see.

For example: if you install kdegames with yum, it adds all the sub-packages as 
dependencies. But if you later uninstall kdegames-foo, it wil only uninstall 
kdegames-foo and the kdegames meta-package. All other subpackages will remain 
untouched.

The idea on creating yum groups would satisfy this "problem" and the issue in 
comment #10 at bugzilla. But IMO creating such groups in yum would pollute 
the yum's groups and it's not exactly what we want.

> Jonathan.

-- 
[]'s
Eitch

http://www.devin.com.br/eitch/
"Talk is cheap. Show me the code." - Linus Torvalds