Is yum groups broken in f20 ?

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2013-12-16 at 00:37 -0500, James Antill wrote:

> > Oh, and based on reports I've read, I'd strongly recommend against
> > running 'yum group mark convert', as yum apparently suggests to you at
> > times. What this is supposed to do, roughly, is "convert" a legacy
> > system to 'groups as objects' - it tries to figure out from your
> > installed package set and (I don't know what else, unicorn droppings?)
> > which groups you 'have installed', and write that info out
> > to /var/lib/yum/groups/* . However, it seems like in practice, it
> > decides that any group from which you have even a single mandatory or
> > default package is 'installed',
> 
>  Right, because this is what "yum groups list" does in the simple/compat
> modes.
> 
> >  and consequently, your next 'yum update'
> > will try to pull in all the other packages from all those groups, which
> > you probably don't want.
> 
>  I could blacklist all the other packages known in the group, I guess.
> Conversion was always going to be kind of "uh" ... but I guess that's
> probably the better way to go.

I dunno, that doesn't sound awesome either. It seems to me like
conversion is something you should only do at all if you can do fairly
accurately, or at least conservatively. I can see the current conversion
code is very simple and I can guess you don't want to make it more
complex, so anything too clever is probably out, but how about the
'extremely simple, very conservative' version - only mark a group as
installed if all of its non-optional packages are installed? This will
have a lot of false negatives on upgraded systems, of course, but I
can't think of a non-complex solution for that :( You could, I guess,
pick some arbitrary 'completion' threshold ("group is installed if 80%
of non-optional packages are installed") without it getting _too_
complex, but it's still definitely more complex than the current case.

One thing I would suggest is to take out the message that's currently
printed which encourages people to run the command, preferably ASAP.
Everyone I've come across who's run it and didn't like the consequences
has run it because they saw that message. If we kill the message, we
probably kill most of the problem...

Thanks for looking after these!
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net