about php-qa, phpUnderControl and meta packages

[James Antill]

On Wed, 2010-06-02 at 14:52 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-06-02 at 18:31 +0200, Christof Damian wrote:
> > Second question: I would love to have a meta package which brings all
> > of these packages ( phpunit, phpmd, phpcpd, phpdoc, phpcs, Mockery,
> > ...) together and allows installation with one yum command. But as far
> > as I could detect from the random posts it seems that meta packages
> > are not really wanted on Fedora. An alternative is the comps list, but
> > that doesn't allow for rapid changes and phpqa would be a bit
> > specific.
> 
> For whatever reason, We Don't Like Metapackages and the 'recommended'
> way to do it is with a package group. I've never seen a particularly
> coherent reason given for this, but never mind. Some packagers _have_
> done metapackages, and none of them have been shot yet. Just sayin'.

 Off the top of my head:

1. They are similar to groups and having two things that are similar is
bad.

2. There's no way to do the groupremove operation, easily.

3. There's no way to do the groupinfo operation, easily.

4. There's no naming guideline, so grouplist operations are also not
easily available.

5. You can't do:

 @mygroup
 -blah

...in a kickstart, if "mygroup" is a metapackage.

6. All the packages as part of the metapackage will be marked as "reason
= dep", which isn't true.

7. The one advantage they have (you can update the metapackage and have
the new members added everywhere) will go away when we get groups as
objects.

8. If you want to remove part of a metapackage, you have to remove the
metapackage itself ... and thus. lose the only advantage they have.

9. There's no way to make them different for different spins.

10. There's no way to extend them from other repos.

-- 
James Antill - james at fedoraproject.org
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