Hi all!
I recently created comps.xml files for RPM Fusion. During that a few
things around comps.xml got discussed on the RPM Fusion lists(¹).
That and a recent change (²) to
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/CompsXml
made me wonder:
How important is comps.xml to us these days?
(Note that I mean Fedora and RPM Fusion with "us" here, as RPM Fusion
for things like this just follows the Fedora guidelines)
Comps.xml is afaics mainly used in anaconda (and thus indirectly in
tools like pungi that rely on anaconda) and yum (if you know what to do)
these days; PackageKit afaics doesn't use it much (or does it use
comps.xml at all? Will that change?); it just lists everything it finds
afaics (correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not using PackageKit much and just
use yum directly).
Thus for most packages it doesn't matter much if they are missing in
comps.xml -- if they are missing there they will not be able to select
in anaconda during install, but that's all. Which brings me to the
second question:
Which packages should be in comps.xml and which not?
Round about two years ago (e.g. before the merge) we IIRC for a short
while mainly said and acted like this: round about everything that is
not a lib (those normally get tracked in by deps when needed) or a devel
package should be mentioned in comps.xml; that of course included
command line apps(³). Note sure if it ever made it to the guidelines
with these or similar words; likely not. These days the wiki says:
If you maintain an application which makes sense for a user to select
during installation, [...] make sure that your package is listed in a
reasonable group in the comps-fn.xml.in files.
I consider the "during installation" part not much helpful because a
package that seems unimportant during installation for 99% of the users
might be something a few other users will look out for. Heck, some new
Fedora users might even abort the Fedora install at this point if they
miss a package they really plan to use with Fedora.
But that is only one of the problems afaics; according to
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/PackageStatus/CompsF10Missing
there are 2866 packages in comps-f10 and 1711 packages missing (seems
the SRPMS are used as a base here; I'm wondering if using RPMs might be
more wise, but that is just one more thing to discuss); some of
those 1711 really are in fedora for quite a while and really look to me
like worthwhile mentioning in comps.xml (see above), to make sure people
can find and select them right during install with anaconda. Do we care?
Cu
knurd
(¹) doesn't matter much for this discussion, but for the curious see
this thread
http://lists.rpmfusion.org/pipermail/rpmfusion-developers/2008-September/001027.html
(²)
https://fedoraproject.org/w/index.php?title=PackageMaintainers%2FCompsXml&diff=49865&oldid=36786
(³) see also
http://lists.rpmfusion.org/pipermail/rpmfusion-developers/2008-September/001103.html
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