rpm groups and fedora: a modest proposal

[Jeremy Katz]

On Tue, 2004-05-25 at 21:49 -0400, Brad Smith wrote:
> I concede the point about utils like anaconda being geared more toward
> using comps.xml than the Group field and agree that we should settle on
> one rather than both. But I'm not convinced that it's better to keep all
> this information in one file (even one file per repo) instead of in the
> packages themselves. What, other than current development trends,
> warrants the use of a file that would need to be updated every time a
> package got added to a repository if reaching an accepted standard for
> Group field values would suffice?

The problem with using the Group field is that it means that
reorganizing the way packages get displayed requires a rebuild of the
packages.  This is very heavy-weight, especially when you consider that
different sites may want slightly different categorizations of packages.
Having them to have to rebuild the packages to get this is non-ideal as
that's far more fragile and something that's likely to not succeed or
introduce other problems.  Editing an XML file is fairly low risk

Jeremy