Proposal: Drop comps

[Vít Ondruch]

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Can we just drop comps entirely (or at least trim them down
significantly)? I know that this will not happen from day to day, but I
see the comps just as an ugly workaround for missing weak dependencies,
which we have now.


Vít




Dne 10.7.2015 v 14:05 Stephen Gallagher napsal(a):
>  (Please keep the conversation on the devel list; I'm CCing it the
> rel
>  -eng list to make sure all the relevant people see the initial message)
>
>  This past week, the Fedora Packaging Committee approved the use of
>  "weak dependencies" in Fedora. What this means is that RPM packages can
>  now have three levels of dependency-resolution: Requires, Recommends
>  and Suggests.
>   * Requires: the requested package cannot function without this
>  additional package installed
>   * Recommends: the requested package can function in some minimal
>  capacity without this additional package installed, but the majority of
>  installations will want it for full productivity. These are usually
>  core plugins for the primary package. DNF defaults to installing
>  Recommends: dependencies automatically.
>   * Suggests: the requested package can easily function without this
>  additional package. This module may provide some less-common
>  functionality that a user might want. DNF defaults to *not* installing
>  Suggests: packages automatically.
>
>  Traditionally, we have only supported "Requires" dependencies and thus
>  the creation of install media (Live and otherwise) has been relatively
>  straightforward: we create a kickstart file that is fed into the
>  compose process containing a list of packages and groups that we want
>  installed onto the target system and the compose process automatically
>  pulls in all of the dependencies. However, with the advent of weak
>  dependencies, we have new questions that need answering about how this
>  compose process should work. (We also need to investigate what exactly
>  happens with the tools we have today - some of which still use yum, not
>  DNF - when weak dependencies are added to the mix).
>
>  From my perspective, there are three ways that we could choose to go:
>
>  1) Follow the default DNF behavior: Requires: and Recommends: packages
>  are included on the install media (and therefore also installed
>  together onto the target system)
>
>  2) Include *all* dependencies - Requires, Recommends and Suggests - on
>  the install media. The installer would still follow DNF defaults, so
>  the target system would get only the Requires and Recommends packages
>  unless the Suggests: packages are explicitly selected (which will also
>  require the creation of additional comps.xml changes to include the
>  Suggests packages)
>
>  3) Include only Requires: dependencies by default and require spin
>  -kickstarts owners to explicitly add any Recommends or Suggests
>  packages that they also want to include. Packages added explicitly will
>  be installed as described in 2) (requiring additional comps.xml changes
>  to include Suggests stuff)
>
>
>  Note that at the moment, DNF itself does not have a configuration
>  option to tweak the default install behavior, so 'dnf install'
>  effectively treats Recommends the same way as Requires (but 'dnf
>  remove' will treat them differently, of course). I discussed this with
>  the DNF developers this morning and they hope to have a configuration
>  option and/or command-line argument available to change this behavior
>  before Beta Freeze, so we should still be able to ship F23 with any of
>  the above options.
>
>  I think the best time to make these decisions is now, well in advance
>  of the Alpha Freeze so we have time to make adjustments as needed.
>  Thank you for reading to the end, I know the above has been a wall-o'
>  -text.
>
>  
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