Proposed F19 Feature: Yum Groups as Objects

[Kamil Dudka]

On Monday, January 28, 2013 11:58:00 Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> On Mon, 28 Jan 2013 19:49:50 +0100
> 
> Kamil Dudka <kdudka at redhat.com> wrote:
> > On Monday, January 28, 2013 10:26:01 Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> > > On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 16:52:18 +0100,
> > > 
> > >    Kamil Dudka <kdudka at redhat.com> wrote:
> > > >I have been always wondering why yum needs a special set of
> > > >commands to manipulate groups of packages.  What would be the
> > > >downside of using just packages that install no files (a.k.a.
> > > >meta-packages) instead of groups?
> > > 
> > > Removing meta packages doesn't remove the dependencies. So you more
> > > or less have the same problem. It is easy to install groups, but
> > > tricky to remove them.
> > 
> > However, the above applies to packages, too.  If I install the
> > eclipse package, which pulls in 104 packages for dependencies, there
> > should be a way to remove the eclipse package together with those 104
> > packages. This kind of operations would be better to support in
> > general, instead of hacking up pseudo-solutions like yum's package
> > groups.
> 
> Yum history works just fine for me for this case.
> 
> yum install eclipse
> <play around, decide I don't have time now>
> yum history undo last

I meant a different kind of operation -- something like the following
on Gentoo Linux:

# cave resolve \!kde-base/kdebase-meta --purge '*/*'

... which removes all packages (in)directly required by kde-base/kdebase-meta 
only, without breaking anything else I installed in between.  Also notice that 
kde-base/kdebase-meta is just a package.  AFAIK, there is no such thing like 
package groups needed on Gentoo Linux.

Kamil