> On Jan 31, 2023, at 2:39 PM, Adam Williamson <adamwill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Hey folks! > > I've sort of happened into doing some maintenance of fedora-comps over > the last few years. Something that bugs me while working on this is how > many "shopping list" groups we still have. I'm talking about things > like the network-server group: I stumbled into a similar thing recently for the Amazon Linux version of comps. It’s had the benefit of at least one time going “oh, we shall start from scratch here and not have the accumulated cruft over the past <years>!”, but the disadvantage of growing its own (unique!) cruft. We have notably fewer sections that are shopping lists, but do find value in the groups for things that are groups for specific types of images. So we have a “container” group which is what the image recipe for the container image installs, same with “ami-minimal” and “ami” for the standard and minimal AMIs respectively. This lets us do nice things such as modify that over time, not require image recipe updates for every possible change etc. The most notable being that (in the ideal scenario, which is the normal case), the content of each of these images for a particular snapshot of the repo is already built into the repo. > <id>network-server</id> > <_name>Network Servers</_name> > <_description>These packages include network-based servers such as DHCP, Kerberos and NIS.</_description> > <default>false</default> > <uservisible>true</uservisible> > <packagelist> > <packagereq type="optional">389-ds-base</packagereq> > <packagereq type="optional">ahcpd</packagereq> > <packagereq type="optional">amanda-server</packagereq> > <packagereq type="optional">babeld</packagereq> > <packagereq type="optional">cobbler</packagereq> > <packagereq type="optional">dhcp-relay</packagereq> > <packagereq type="optional">dhcp-server</packagereq> > <packagereq type="optional">dnsmasq</packagereq> > <packagereq type="optional">freeradius</packagereq> > ...etc etc... > > I'd define a "shopping list" group as one based around a vague theme > and whose packages are all (or almost all) optional - it's clearly not > a group that's meant to be installed as a whole, or as a part of a > system deployment. These groups were instead designed as lists to pick > individual packages from, in the old anaconda installer interface that > let you do individual package selection (this is, what, a decade or so > ago now?), and in software installation apps that similarly let you > pick packages from the comps groups. > > Neither GNOME Software nor KDE Discover uses these "shopping list" > groups. (The older GNOME tool that preceded Software did, I think; > again, that was years ago now). However, dnfdragora (which is the main > package manager on some smaller desktops, and may still be installed on > KDE alongside Discover by default, I'm not sure) *does* - you can > browse by comps group (and 'category', which are collections of comps > groups intended for this purpose, different from the 'environments' > used by anaconda) in dnfdragora. Maybe some other GUI packaging tools > do as well, I'm not sure of any others to check. > > It does not appear to me like anyone besides me does much maintenance > on these groups. For instance, I don't think anyone but me has touched > the network-server group since 2019. I wonder if anyone has used any of them since 2019? :) I can’t really think of a way to find this out though.. short of doing some hefty gymnastics around package download logs... > These are the groups I'd identify as "shopping list groups": > > cloud-infrastructure > directory-server > dns-server (one 'default' package) > editors > education > ftp-server (one 'mandatory' package) > games (the games spin does not use this group, it has its own list) > graphical-internet > graphics > legacy-network-server > libreoffice-development > network-server > neuron-modelling-simulators > news-server (one 'mandatory' package) > office > server-cfg (one 'default' package) > sound-and-video > text-internet > window-managers If it helps as a data point, we don’t have any of these groups in Amazon Linux and nobody has *ever* asked for them (well.. maybe *once*…) > there are a few other groups that don't fit strictly into the > definition but are still of rather dubious usefulness, like the 'web- > server' group which is rather stuck in the 2000s (including php, php- > ldap, php-mysqlnd, squid and webalizer by default - is this how anyone > "deploys a web server" these days?) Being stuck in the 2000s is kind of > a defining feature of these groups - any time you see a vaguely modern > package, it's probably been put there by me, replacing something that > got orphaned. Otherwise most of them seem to have been defined back > then and rarely or never updated since. (Another example: the last time > the 'games' group was updated by anyone but me was 2017, adding one > game; the last update before that seems to have been in 2013). > > So, I'm wondering what folks think we should do with these. We could, > of course, just get rid of them. But perhaps they are still of value to > someone? Is anyone still "package shopping" via dnfdragora or some > other tool, using these groups? Does anyone want to step up and > actively 'own' some of them for maintenance? Any other thoughts? Delete them all! I can’t think of a modern usage that isn’t geared towards the image-type scenario I describe above. _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
