meta-packages (was Re: FC2 and general LDAP Support)

[Panu Matilainen]

On Wed, 26 Nov 2003, Steven Pritchard wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 26, 2003 at 04:50:25PM -0800, Ulrich Drepper wrote:
> > IMO such meta RPMs are truly a nice way to do these things.
> 
> That reminds me...  Since Fedora Core includes tools that will
> automatically install dependencies, would now be a good time to think
> about adding meta-packages for things like KDE, GNOME, etc.?

Been there, done that, trust me you do not want those as meta-packages 
(empty packages except with huge amount of requires: foo, bar ...). 
There are better ways to achieve the effect, have a look at yum's 
groupinstall operation which uses comps.xml to find out what belongs to 
what group but doesn't require installing additional bogus packages which 
just create bogus dependencies. Apt can do the same with a little help 
from Lua, latest apt-rpm version has apt-groupinstall in contrib/ 
directory which does just that.

	- Panu -