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

[Andrew Ford]

On 11/07/11 22:40, James Antill wrote:
> 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
>
>
OK - I'll buy that (I hadn't noticed - or maybe hadn't appreciated the 
significance of - the sentence about "remove operates on groups...".

Perhaps the text in the "install" command description about "if the name 
starts with an @ character..." should be promoted to the introduction, 
and integrated into the description of package names (that I moved from 
its section at the end "Specifying Package Names" to the start of the 
man page).  Specifying groups with an @ sign is quite a fundamental part 
of the interface.

Andrew

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Andrew Ford
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