comps discussion at fudcon and the future

[Jeroen van Meeuwen]

Matthew Woehlke wrote:
> Josh Boyer wrote:
>> Ok, but if group-metapkg has Requires on all the packages in the
>> group, then won't:
>>
>> yum remove foo-is-part-of-group
>>
>> hit the Requires on group-metapkg and have yum try to remove it,
>> along with everything else?
> 
> For the benefit of the list, the answer is "yes". This is why I don't 
> like using metapackages this way; you can't selectively install them.
> 
> In fact, this reminds me... on my Asus cleanup project, one of the 
> things I did NOT remove was the xorg-drivers package, for exactly this 
> reason. This is one case where I want 'yum update' to know about new 
> xorg drivers. But this means I can't remove drivers I don't need, 
> because it will remove the metapackage, which means I won't 
> automagically find out about new drivers.
> 

Euhm, I can remove xorg-drivers without any dependencies, but not a 
xorg-x11-drv-* package. I'm not sure why these other packages depend on 
xorg-drivers, but that's not how a meta package would be used:

yum install @foo would install bar and baz

yum remove baz would remove baz

yum update @foo would pull in baz again, and maybe newpkg1.

In the last command, the packages baz and newpkg1 would be listed as 
"Installing for dependencies" (rather then "Updating").

> This is actually a great example of why I would like a "group 
> subscription" model; I could "subscribe" to xorg-drivers, and yum would 
> tell me about new drivers, and I could decide if I want to install them, 
> without being forced to install a bunch of drivers I don't need.
> 

The above example does exactly what you want it to do, just not how you 
would like it to do so, I presume.

Kind regards,

Jeroen van Meeuwen
-kanarip