[Yum-devel] group DB

[James Antill]

On Fri, 2009-05-22 at 18:12 -0400, James Antill wrote:
> Some thoughts about group DB (having groups as real objects). I mainly
> wrote this for me, to see if "group DB" was actually possible. I think
> so :).
> 
> I think the "big" issue people want to change is that given:
> 
> 	yum install blah-package-in-KDE-group
> 	yum groupinstall KDE
> 	yum groupremove  KDE
> 
> ...you have blah left at the end. The other desire is that given:
> 
> 	yum groupinstall KDE
> 	yum remove blah-package-in-KDE-group
> 	yum groupupdate  KDE
> 
> ...you don't have blah added at the end. The last interesting feature is
> that given:
> 
> 	yum groupinstall KDE
> 	# packages added to group KDE
> 	yum update
> 
> ...you have the new KDE packages.

 Blah, it's been way too long and this first attempt mostly seems to
work.
 What this patch does:

1. Stores a list of installed group id's, but only ID's ... we don't try
to store the 666 names.

2. Stores a list of all package names we've seen belonging to each
groupid.

3. In the yumdb we store a single (yes, single, see point #1 above)
group id that an installed package can be a "member" of (and we copy
that on upgrades).

4. Add a "groups" sub-command, add a few sub-sub-commands to help with
testing (and probably deployment).

5. Changes "group install/remove/list/info" to use the "installed" data.

6. Changes "upgrade" to also upgrade groups (install new members, #3
above).

...this is, in theory, configurable through self.conf.groups_are_real
but I haven't tested the old code still does the same thing and other
stuff is not exactlly 100% tested, but it was testable by me.

 Patch is here:

http://james.fedorapeople.org/yum/patches/groups-are-real.patch

 Comments welcome, I'm sure this won't be the magical pony everyone
wants and the switch will be a PITA. But hopefully it's closer, and it
will solve things like 647493.