Question to show-installed

[Radek Holy]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Florian Festi" <ffesti at redhat.com>
> To: yum-devel at lists.baseurl.org
> Sent: Tuesday, March 17, 2015 11:45:50 AM
> Subject: Re: Question to show-installed
> 
> On 03/16/2015 04:18 PM, Radek Holy wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > ----- Original Message -----
> >> From: "Florian Festi" <ffesti at redhat.com>
> >> To: yum-devel at lists.baseurl.org
> >> Sent: Friday, March 13, 2015 10:55:58 AM
> >> Subject: Re: Question to show-installed
> >>
> >> On 03/12/2015 11:10 AM, Radek Holy wrote:
> >>> Take a look at `dnf history userinstalled`. I think this is actually what
> >>> you are looking for. The output is designed so that it can be directly
> >>> used in the Kickstart files. The disadvantage is that DNF does not share
> >>> the history database with YUM. Thus the command works only for packages
> >>> installed via DNF. If a package is not installed via DNF, the command
> >>> assumes that the package is not "installed by a user".
> >>
> >> With the yum/dnf history being messed up the way it is I wonder if this
> >> command should actually do what show-installed does in addition to
> >> looking into the history. Ending up with a kickstart list that is
> >> missing important parts of the system is of very little help.
> >>
> >> This is IMHO one example where we just do not give the user the
> >> information she needs although we actually know that data we provide is
> >> lacking.
> > 
> > Actually, I confused "YUM/DNF history" with "YUMDB/DNFDB". DNF would need
> > *YUMDB* to work with packages installed by YUM. But the rest is correct.
> > 
> > Hm, if you could tell me what does "show-installed" do, I could tell you
> > whether it is what `dnf history userinstalled` should do. Man pages say
> > "gives a compact description of the packages installed (or given) making
> > use of the comps groups found in the repositories". This is very vague. I
> > can talk about "dnf info installed" and "dnf group" but I know that
> > "show-installed" does something else.
> 
> Well, show-installed tries to construct a minimal list of groups and
> packages that can go into a kickstart file to reconstruct the current
> set of packages. I implemented it basically as a prove of concept
> implementation that I had hoped would be picked up to close the gaps we
> have in the userinstalled data in the yum/dnf db/history. Unfortunately
> this never happened.
> 
> > But I guess that the answer is: "no". Actually, the purpose of `dnf history
> > userinstalled` is very simple. It should do what was requested in a bug
> > 884615.
> 
> The problem is that the definition of "simple" is the wrong one. It is
> "simple" in the sense of "easy to get from the data we have". IMHO we
> should focus more an making answers to the simple questions that users
> would ask available. The question that comes to mind is "What got
> installed on this system?" dnf history userinstalled asks this question
> but restricts the answer to "but only after the system got installed"
> which is a restriction, making the question more complicated - much less
> useful - but more easy to answer.

As you can see from the bug, the command *is* useful to someone. And the reporter also explicitly asked to exclude packages installed by Anaconda. So, he already asks the "complicated question".

I think that both including and excluding the packages installed by Anaconda make sense. Personally, I don't care about which packages are installed on my system. I just trust Fedora that it's defaults are good for me. If there is something extra, I don't care. If there is something missing, I install it at the moment when I need it. So, in my case, I don't want Anaconda-installed packages to be listed there. But also I don't need this command at all since the packages (including the leaves) are completely uninteresting for me.

> What we'd need is a yum list command that returns a (kickstart
> compatible) list of groups and packages that will get the system in the
> same state as it is right now - including the yumdb metadata. So all
> packages and groups that were tagged with reason "user" would still be
> in the reinstalled system (some packages might be additionally)[*].
> 
> The reason why this is an interesting command to have is not only the
> user in kickstart but much more that it gives a compact, human readable
> description of the whole system.
> 
> This would of course need to be based on the userinstalled data but with
> additional reasoning for the leaf packages that - for what ever reason -
> are not tagged as userinstalled.
> 
> Florian
> 
> [*] I guess this won't work because anaconda won't tag the packages
> properly but this does not disprove my point. In opposite it is (if it
> is in fact true) just one more place where this whole "reason" thing is
> not thought through/not properly implemented.

I agree with you that if there is someone (or preferably multiple people) who needs this functionality, we probably should implement it. But I'm not convinced that `dnf history userinstalled` necessarily doesn't do what it should.
-- 
Radek Holý
Associate Software Engineer
Software Management Team
Red Hat Czech