comps packagereq items default to "mandatory"

Orion Poplawski orion at cora.nwra.com
Thu Oct 1 16:06:16 UTC 2015


I'm not sure that this is common knowledge as it is not specifically mentioned
in either:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_use_and_edit_comps.xml_for_package_groups

or

https://fedorahosted.org/comps/

that the default type for packagereq is "mandatory".  As a result I believe
that there are a *large* number of packages listed in comps that are
inadvertently being marked as "mandatory", e.g.:


  <group>
    <id>standard</id>
    <_name>Standard</_name>
    <_description>Common set of utilities that extend the minimal
installation.</_description>
    <default>false</default>
    <uservisible>false</uservisible>
    <packagelist>
      <packagereq>abrt-cli</packagereq>
      <packagereq>acl</packagereq>
      <packagereq>at</packagereq>
      <packagereq>attr</packagereq>
      <packagereq>bash-completion</packagereq>
....

  <group>
    <id>kde-desktop</id>
    <_name>KDE</_name>
    <_description>The KDE Plasma Workspaces, a highly-configurable graphical
user interface which includes a panel, desktop, system icons and desktop
widgets, and many powerful KDE applications.</_description>
    <default>false</default>
    <uservisible>false</uservisible>
    <packagelist>
      <packagereq>abrt-desktop</packagereq>
      <packagereq>adwaita-gtk2-theme</packagereq>
      <packagereq>akonadi</packagereq>
      <packagereq>akonadi-mysql</packagereq>
      <packagereq>akregator</packagereq>
      <packagereq>apper</packagereq>
...

Almost none of those appear to be "Mandatory".

We think this is becoming an issue now because it appears that dnf perhaps now
prevents kickstart installs from removing mandatory packages from the install
set.  See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1199868 and the good
detective work done by Adam Williamson for more background.

So, it seems we can either (perhaps) go back to the previous behavior, and/or
fix comps.  We may want to fix comps anyways as I expect this has UI effects
as well (perhaps cannot deselect packages after selecting a group?).


-- 
Orion Poplawski
Technical Manager                     303-415-9701 x222
NWRA, Boulder/CoRA Office             FAX: 303-415-9702
3380 Mitchell Lane                       orion at nwra.com
Boulder, CO 80301                   http://www.nwra.com


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