[Fwd: Re: Comps, or, Making it Easier for Users to Find Software]

[Michael Thomas]

Forwarding this from f-e-l.  Apologies if you have already read it.

Jeremy has asked if anyone wants to help with a cvs submit filter for
verifying the integrity of the comps-fe5.xml file.  This should be
simple enough with the 'xmlwf'.

He's also asked if anyone wants to submit patches for yum so that we can
install optional group packages more easily (most games fall under this
category).

Any takers?

--Wart

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Comps, or, Making it Easier for Users to Find Software
Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2006 15:04:58 -0400
From: Jeremy Katz 
Reply-To: Discussion related to Fedora Extras

To: Discussion related to Fedora Extras 
References: 


On Mon, 2006-04-17 at 11:20 -0700, Michael Thomas wrote:
> Jeremy Katz wrote:
> > On Sun, 2006-04-16 at 12:00 -0700, Wart wrote:
> > One thing that would help is a script to be run as a pre-commit check to
> > ensure the file is well-formed.
>
> I'll ask the SIG to see if we can come up with something.  What are the
> rules for pre-commit scripts in terms of languages, locations,
> dependencies, etc.?  Or is it enough to run xmlwf on the file?

The XML file just needs to be well-formed.  Eventually, translations
will be getting merged in, but that's the "easy" part.  And dependencies
also don't need to be specified as those get resolved at runtime
> > > Additionaly, it seems that the FE games are listed as 'optional'
> > > packages in yum, which means that users can't use 'yum groupinstall
> > > games' as a shortcut to get all of them.  What determines if a package
> > > is 'optional' or 'required'?  Would it be possible to change it so that
> > > users can get all of the games via 'yum groupinstall', either by
> > > reclassifying the FE5 games as 'required', or by creating a new category
> > > for these games?
> >
> > If a package is required, then the group isn't considered installed
> > without the package being installed.  You almost certainly don't want
> > that behavior with all of the games :-)  And I don't even think a
> > separate category is really what's wanted.  What problem are you trying
> > to solve by installing all of the games?[1]
>
> The ultimate problem is that I'm trying to avoid doing any real work.
> :)  I'd like to be able to install all of the games with one command
> after an initial system install, and later use one command to pull in
> any new games that have since been added to the repo.

Heh ;)
> > Jeremy
> >
> > [1] Note, that it would be pretty easy to write the little tool using
> > the yum interfaces that just installed all of the optional packages in a
> > group.
>
> That's what I did for now, which is when I discovered that 'yum
> groupinfo' didn't list them all.  Perhaps there could be an option to
> 'yum groupinstall' to install optional packages, such as
> "yum --includeoptional groupinstall games".

Yeah, I'm thinking that something like this is probably the best
approach to the problem.  It shouldn't be that hard to add support for
both
* yum groupinstall --alloptional foo
and
* yum groupinstall --requiredonly foo

to yum.  Anyone want to volunteer to write the patch? :-)

Jeremy