[Yum-devel] is the "groups" command necessary

James Antill james at fedoraproject.org
Mon Jul 11 21:40:48 UTC 2011


On Mon, 2011-07-11 at 22:21 +0100, Andrew Ford wrote:
> I have been diffing the 3.2.29 yum.8 file against the trunk version and 
> see that there is a new "groups" command.  In my opinion this is 
> superfluous, and introduces a command that is both a reporting command 
> and a package manipulation command.  As the man page says, "yum install 
> @group" is the same as "yum groupinstall group", as is "yum groupupdate 
> group".
> 
> Could one not make "yum remove @group" do what "yum groupremove group" 
> does, and deprecate groupinstall, groupupgrade, and groupremove -

 remove @foo

...already works (and is documented in the man page :). 
 The command was integrated for a two reasons:

1. We already have 4 commands in "yum help", so putting them under a
single "groups" command makes help nicer and allows the user to do
things like "yum groups help" to see what they can do. As you said, most
of the normal commands take "@foo" group id's anyway ... but not
everyone knows that magic, and we'd need to keep the commands around for
backwards compat. anyway.

2. There are plans to have "groups are real objects"¹, which means we'll
probably need a bunch of other "group type" commands ... for altering
those objects.

...on the other hand if groups do die instead (I doubt it, but...) then
at least we only need to get users to ignore one command now ;).


¹ http://james.fedorapeople.org/yum/patches/groups-are-real.patch



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