Proposal: Drop comps

[Vít Ondruch]

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Dne 14.7.2015 v 15:21 Stephen Gallagher napsal(a):
> On Tue, 2015-07-14 at 10:13 +0200, Vít Ondruch wrote:
>>
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>> Can we just drop comps entirely (or at least trim them down
>> significantly)? I know that this will not happen from day to day, but
>> I see the comps just as an ugly workaround for missing weak
>> dependencies, which we have now.
>>
>
>
> Comps has been used for this purpose sure (using the grouping mechanism
> to specify optional packages in addition to critical ones). There are
> other uses for comps that you're ignoring, though.
>
>  * Anaconda relies on comps.xml environment groups to provide the
> selection of which system to install on all network-install media.

True, but nothing which could not be changed if there is enough interest.

>
>
>  * The comps.xml groups also provide grouping for logically-connected
> packages that do not map to weak dependencies well. (For example: an
> "astronomy" group could pull in numerous scientific packages related to
> astronomy)

We can get back to metapackages, which are still used in Fedora in
various forms anyway.

>
>
> I don't think there's any sense in removing comps.xml entirely,

The problem with comps is that (IMO), it are not widely understand what
are they good for, how to manage them, how to change them etc, while the
package dependencies are quite well understood.

>  though
> I'll be the first to say that it would be great if someone went through
> and cleaned it up a bit. There's a lot of old cruft around.

Sure, the first step is trimming down. For example, the rubyonrails
group could be removed and replaced by appropriate Suggests in
rubygem-rails (as soon as DNF supports the appropriate options [1] though).


Vít



[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1229701
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