comps discussion at fudcon and the future

[Kevin Kofler]

seth vidal wrote:
> When did you become a yum user? :)

When apt-rpm broke beyond repair (well, it's finally being fixed now), but
that would be something for another rant. ;-)

>> I don't want packages to be magically added just because they're in some
>> group.
> 
> That's the point of the groups - of them being transitioned to metapkgs
> - so we no longer have the ambiguity. It's like watching a bad episode
> of moonlighting "will they? Won't they?".

But that's sidestepping the question whether the resolution "They will" is a
good idea in the first place.

> New stuff showing up in the repo is completely unrelated to the groups.

... which is exactly why it shouldn't get installed just because it got
added to some group. :-)

>> I can't believe I'm alone with that expectation. I actually think there
>> will be lots of complaints about unwanted packages getting automatically
>> added (for a reason most users won't understand - metapackages are black
>> magic as far as they're concerned).
> 
> and groups are worse black magic - if only b/c they have this way of
> rebounding on the people who do understand them. :-/

Well, I think that with the suggested changes, there will be a lots of
complaints about unwanted packages getting installed.

But what do I care? I can just remove all the metapackages. It's average
users who are going to get hurt (i.e. exactly the people you're trying to
help). :-(

> Which is why we can do groups of groups and more precisely break them
> down into smaller sections. so you install what you need, not the whole
> world.

That sounds reasonable, but I'm not sure it's going to scale. If we end up
with one group per package, we're failing.

> I suspect most users never know what comps is and they do all their
> discovery by doing:
> yum search someword
> or
> yum list somepkgnametheyknow

You think most people don't use the GUIs? I'm not claiming you're wrong
because I don't have any stats, but are you sure?

> Really? Who is making the plans for soft deps. Doesn't seem like it at
> the rpm layer.

Last I checked it was on the rpm.org todo list. Maybe it got dropped. That
would be unfortunate, because I think they could be useful, I've seen
several cases where they would have helped (just one example: Kile (a LaTeX
editor) can call many tools, most users will want them dragged in, but some
don't and Kile will still work, with reduced functionality, without them -
just grep for Requires(hint) in packages (mostly those touched by Rex
Dieter) to see more places where we'd like soft dependencies) and Debian
fans keep making fun of us because we don't have them ;-).

        Kevin Kofler