hierarchical comps groups proposal

[Ales Kozumplik]

On 03/05/2014 09:40 AM, Jens Petersen wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I would like to suggest the idea of adding support for
> hierarchical comps groups to Fedora.
>
> The idea is make yum groups in comps more modular,
> ie groups could require other groups not just packages;
> at this time I don't think it would require any GUI changes.
> Currently comps is quite linear (flat) and we have
> to do silly things like adding a group to add a package to
> an environment group,  and duplicating certain sets of packages
> across certain groups. Hierarchical groups would allow more flexible
> package group choices, avoid package repetition in comps, and
> also allow people to install what they need more precisely.
>
> eg Someone might only want to install @gnome-core-desktop
> @mate-core-desktop, @asian-fonts, etc.  I am sure there are
> many more possible examples.
>

Yep, I'm for it. One thing: the proposal should explicitly mention how 
hierarchical groups make environment groups obsolete, and then make them 
obsolete, so both the implementators and the users have one less 
obscurely defined concept to deal with.

> With the Fedora.next initiative now seems a good time to do this.
> It should probably be made a system-wide change proposal
> (I only noticed the deadline this week!)
> but I wanted to post here first for discussion since
> I think it needs changes to yum, dnf, and maybe other tools.
>
> I would be happy to help (at least) prepare a Change proposal for
> this, specially if other people (stakeholders) are willing
> to help make this happen.

We can contribute the changes on DNF side once libcomps supports that.

Ales