On Tue, 14 Jul 2015 15:53:49 +0200
Vít Ondruch <vondruch(a)redhat.com> wrote:
...snip...
> * 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.
Metapackages have a lot of downsides too, only a few parts of which are
made better by weak dependencies.
See:
http://yum.baseurl.org/wiki/YumGroupsOverview
> 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.
So it's an education problem?
> 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).
I suspect there may be lots of other cases too...
kevin