comps categories: are they any use to anyone any more?

[Adam Williamson]

Working on comps for the NetworkManager submodule change (see other
email) made me wonder: are the comps 'categories' actually used for
anything any more?

I believe they were used in oldUI for presentation of the 'pick a
package' UI. We don't have that UI any more, haven't since Fedora 18. I
don't believe anaconda uses the categories any more. newUI shows
environment groups down the left hand side of the screen. On the right
hand side it shows the optional groups related to the current
environment group at the top, and then all other user visible package
groups at the bottom.

So if I'm right that anaconda isn't using the categories any more, is
anything else? Or can we just ditch them?
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net

[Bill Nottingham]

Adam Williamson (awilliam(a)redhat.com) said: 
>  Working on comps for the NetworkManager submodule change (see other
>  email) made me wonder: are the comps 'categories' actually used for
>  anything any more?
>  
>  I believe they were used in oldUI for presentation of the 'pick a
>  package' UI. We don't have that UI any more, haven't since Fedora 18. I
>  don't believe anaconda uses the categories any more. newUI shows
>  environment groups down the left hand side of the screen. On the right
>  hand side it shows the optional groups related to the current
>  environment group at the top, and then all other user visible package
>  groups at the bottom.
>  
>  So if I'm right that anaconda isn't using the categories any more, is
>  anything else? Or can we just ditch them? 
Check the post-install tools; I believe at least one of apper or yumex still
uses them.

Bill

[Tim Lauridsen]

On Sun, Jun 22, 2014 at 3:10 AM, Bill Nottingham <notting(a)splat.cc&gt; wrote:

>  Check the post-install tools; I believe at least one of apper or yumex
>  still
>  uses them. 

Yes, Yumex is still using categories to organize groups, both in the
current stable release and in nextgen release based on the dnf api.

Removing the will be a very bad idea IMHO, it it will be very messy to
present groups in a ui, if they are not orded in some way

Tim

[Adam Williamson]

On Sun, 2014-06-22 at 08:00 +0200, Tim Lauridsen wrote:
>  On Sun, Jun 22, 2014 at 3:10 AM, Bill Nottingham
> <notting(a)splat.cc&gt; wrote:
>  
>  >
>  > Check the post-install tools; I believe at least one of apper or yumex
>  > still
>  > uses them.
>  
>  
>  Yes, Yumex is still using categories to organize groups, both in the
>  current stable release and in nextgen release based on the dnf api.
>  
>  Removing the will be a very bad idea IMHO, it it will be very messy to
>  present groups in a ui, if they are not orded in some way 
on the other hand, there's a clear overlap with 'environment groups'. it
seems like we kinda have one type of group too many. :P
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net

[Tim Lauridsen]

On Sun, Jun 22, 2014 at 6:33 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam(a)redhat.com&gt;
wrote:

>  on the other hand, there's a clear overlap with 'environment
> groups'. it
>  seems like we kinda have one type of group too many. :P
>  
environments is something you can install, categories is not, they fit
different a purpose

Tim

[Adam Williamson]

On Sun, 2014-06-22 at 18:43 +0200, Tim Lauridsen wrote:
>  On Sun, Jun 22, 2014 at 6:33 PM, Adam Williamson
> <awilliam(a)redhat.com&gt;
>  wrote:
>  
>  > on the other hand, there's a clear overlap with 'environment groups'.
> it
>  > seems like we kinda have one type of group too many. :P
>  >
>  
>  environments is something you can install, categories is not, they fit
>  different a purpose 
Yeah, you're probably right. In that case we should probably explain the
difference somewhere - are you aware of anywhere it's currently written
down? There are no comments in the comps.xml files, no documentation in
comps.git, and the text on https://fedorahosted.org/comps is extremely
outdated. I'm happy to update that if someone can give me the necessary
privileges...
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net

[Tim Lauridsen]

On Mon, Jun 23, 2014 at 6:42 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam(a)redhat.com&gt;
wrote:

>  Yeah, you're probably right. In that case we should probably
> explain the
>  difference somewhere - are you aware of anywhere it's currently written
>  down? There are no comments in the comps.xml files, no documentation in
>  comps.git, and the text on https://fedorahosted.org/comps is extremely
>  outdated. I'm happy to update that if someone can give me the necessary
>  privileges...
>  
I have not seen any docs for comps.xml

Tim

[Richard Hughes]

On 23 June 2014 18:00, Tim Lauridsen <tim.lauridsen(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>  I have not seen any docs for comps.xml 
At one point there was a RH developer working on a libcomps project --
if you can track down the project and the maintainer he's probably the
best person to ask for docs.

Richard.

[Kevin Kofler]

Bill Nottingham wrote:
>  Check the post-install tools; I believe at least one of apper or
> yumex
>  still uses them. 
Apper also uses those categories, so they both do.

        Kevin Kofler

[Richard Hughes]

On 24 June 2014 23:54, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler(a)chello.at&gt; wrote:
>  Apper also uses those categories, so they both do. 
Apper uses PackageKit, and from Fedora 21 (or Fedora 20 + copr) it's
been using the hawkey+librepo backend of PackageKit -- this has no
support for comps. So in rawhide, apper won't be using comps at all.

Richard

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Wed, 2014-06-25 at 11:34 +0100, Richard Hughes wrote:
>  Apper uses PackageKit, and from Fedora 21 (or Fedora 20 + copr)
> it's
>  been using the hawkey+librepo backend of PackageKit -- this has no
>  support for comps. So in rawhide, apper won't be using comps at all.
>  
>  Richard 
KDE developers, does Apper require comps support, or is it optional? In
GNOME, only gpk-application uses it and it is optional, which is
probably why this hasn't been implemented.