On Thu, 2003-11-13 at 17:17, David Farning wrote: > I wondering about the importance of the install/remove/update by group > interface in a yumified -packages. > > Implementing the install/remove/update by package interface for yum is > pretty straight forward. The group interface is proving much more > difficult. The problem lies in the fact that comps and rhpl.comps use > rpmheaders while yum works with nevral to keep track of the packages. The group interface is absolutely *crucial* to the usability of the tool. Having 1500 packages ungrouped in any sort of sane, scalable mechanism (and without regard for trimming to just leaf packages instead of listing everything libgal that's a dependency of something ;) is a nitemare. > The two choices I see are: > 1. The nevral could be converted into a list of rpmheaders that are > passed to comps. That is pretty costly. In addition it is kludgy. > > 2. The comps stuff could be rewritten to utilize nevral. > > Any better suggestions would be appreciated. To be honest, trying to kludge either into working is going to lead to a complete lack of maintainability, IMHO. Realistically, both the yum side of things and the redhat-config-packages side of things need to move towards using the New Improved RPM Metadata that's being discussed/developed. Brent and I sat down and cleaned up/refined the design spec we did six months ago for redhat-config-packages and tried to also update it a bit to take into account some of the changes since then. Hopefully we'll finish getting this written up and sent out by the beginning of next week. The short summary is that I think that starting with just the existing code is going to make things far more painful than they should be. Stepping back and looking at the big picture and going from there instead of trying to hijack in things that were never intended to exist is the wrong approach. Also, I would like to move things to where we don't have four different tools for the same basic thing and can have it as consolidated into one tool as much as possible. I'd far rather get things done right, even if it takes longer, than continue the hacks like I've been doing thus far :) Cheers, Jeremy