http://fedoraproject.org/extras/4/i386/repodata/

[Chris Ricker]

On Thu, 14 Jul 2005, Matthew Miller wrote:

> I think there's two distinct purposes for which people want to use groups:
> 
>   A) a way to put similar programs in the same place so they're
>      easy to find by browsing
> 
>   B) a way to define sets of programs useful for a particular environment
>      or task 
> 
> The first is generally what one wants in repoview or in a GUI package tool
> when looking for a particular program.
> 
> The second is what is probably best in the installer, and maybe also useful
> in an after-install GUI tool.

Yep. And a related issue is the mandatory / default / optional stuff. 
(almost) all Extras stuff is added as type=optional. For some 
situations that makes sense, but for others default would be nicer. You 
probably want yum groupinstall games to install all games (default) but 
you probably do not want yum groupinstall mail-server not to install all 3 
MTAs (optional)

> This makes me think that categorization may be better approached via
> "tagging", and then different applications could present different views of
> the tags as appropriate. For example, various web browsers could have tags
> like this:
> 
>   firefox: Web Browser, X11, Typical Desktop, Internet Station
>   dillo: Web Browser, X11, Lightweight Desktop
>   epiphany: Web Browser, X11, GNOME
>   konqueror: Web Browser, X11, KDE
>   lynx: Web Browser, Console, Visually Impaired Desktop
>   elinks: Web Browser, Console
> 
> (Or whatever -- that's off the top of my head.)

How is tagging functionally different from spec groups (other than 
allowing more than one tag)? Isn't the spec group just a very coarse tag?

later,
chris