[Rpm-metadata] groups-sample.xml and groups.dtd are misleading a bit

[seth vidal]

On Mon, 2005-05-09 at 00:33 +0200, Hans-Peter Jansen wrote:
> Hi Seth et.al.,
> 
> today I tackled the yum group setup on my local SuSE 9.3 systems.
> First, I've created a script to convert the SuSE .sel(ection) files into 
> the yum preferred xml format, based on your nice yumgengroups.py.
> During that course, I came across an inconsistency in 
> http://linux.duke.edu/projects/metadata/samples/groups-sample.xml and
> http://linux.duke.edu/projects/metadata/dtd/groups.dtd: the <groupid> 
> tag. Simply using <id>, like yumgengroups.py does, works as expected.
> Would you throw this script into yum/download/misc?
> 

yah - the problem is that the group definition proposed there is not
what the ACTUAL group stuff in yum is using. Yum is using the striaght
(and somewhat weird) comps.xml format from red hat. It's also a
notoriously undocumented format. Check out comps.xml from a fedora or
rhel release and you'll see how it works.


> BTW: the createrepo man page raised the question, in which repo the 
> group definition file should/can go? All repos, the first, any ...

any.


> Could you elaborate a bit, how the different type definitions of 
> groupreq and packagereq tangent yum?

go into yum look at groups.py and read the big comment block at the top.
I think that will help explain it a bit.



> Your script makes sure, that only real rpms will pass. SuSE on the other 
> hand, uses heavily the feature to just ignore unresolvable packages, 
> e.g. they have many *-32bit packages in their groups: they're 
> inexistent in the ia32 world, but came to existence on x86_64..

cute.


> AFAICS, yum does ignore unresolvables silently, too. Can I depend on 
> this feature?

for the groups purposes, yes. Fedora relies on that 'feature' as well.


> Thanks to this stuff, I successfully installed a SuSE 9.3 default setup 
> into an installroot directory with yum today. Great, as this is the 
> first major building block to a nice and handy diskless environment.. 
> Note: in order to avoid millions of "user/group does not exist" 
> warnings (which aren't restorable easily either), I found it necessary 
> to install the glibc with rpm beforehand, together with some 
> dummy /etc/{passwd,group} files.

odd that the ts.order() didn't get that correct. You might want to ask
about the sorting on the install in suse.


> 
> Thanks to everybody involved!

cool.

If you'd like to work on improving the groups format or can give
suggestions on clarifying it please do so. It's something that could use
with a brush up.

thanks!
-sv