[Fedora-packaging] Package Groups / "Meta-Packages"

[Stuart Mumford]

Hello,

Firstly I hope this is the right place to ask this!!

I have been having a discussion on the Fedora SciTech mailing list and we
thought that someone on here might be able to offer us some advice / a
solution!

In discussing the packages to include in a Fedora scientific spin, I
suggested that it might be worth while including the dependencies for IDL
(Interactive Data Language) which is a widely used proprietary data analysis
and visualisation package. (As much as I would rather just use Python this
is not really possible.)

I suggested that perhaps some kind of package group or "meta package" could
be created that would hold all the dependencies for IDL making the install
process easier, if all the dependencies were not included by default . (see
http://goo.gl/6a7jM for a list of the deps)

Does such a mechanism exist within the packaging framework for Fedora and if
so how easy is it to create and maintain such a package?

Thanks
Stuart
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