[Yum] installing by group versus installing by individual packages

[Robert P. J. Day]

Quoting James Antill <james-yum at and.org>:

> "Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday at crashcourse.ca> writes:
>
>> Quoting James Antill <james-yum at and.org>:
>>
>>> "Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday at crashcourse.ca> writes:
>>>
>>>>   trying to clarify a couple things regarding installing/removing
>>>> by yum group on my fedora 19 system. first, what is the rationale
>>>> behind "hidden" groups? what's the motivation that some groups
>>>> (for the case i'm interested in, virtualization) not be user visible?
>>>
>>>  The main idea with hidden is for things like "base", where it's
>>> assumed the user doesn't need to see it. But even that might not be
>>> true now we have groups as objects.
>>
>>   not sure what it means to say "groups are objects" (still reading
>
>  Basically if group_command=objects (default in F19+), instead of
> group_command=simple or compat (compat is the default in all older
> versions).
>  With groups as objects then "yum group install foo" has an object
> representing "foo" and marks that as installed (and which packages are
> installed as part of it) ... without it yum works it out on the fly
> based on which packages are installed (Eg. if all the mandatory
> packages for a group are installed, then that group is installed and
> all the packages "belong" to it).

   or you could have just linked me here: :-)

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/YumGroupsAsObjects

one last potentially dumb question (well, not really, more coming)
is -- how does one list which "groups" are currently "installed"?

   as i read it, if i install the "virtualization" group, something
is now recording that that "object" (the virt group) is installed.
say i now remove one of its mandatory packages explicitly. is that
group now considered to be installed? and how could i display that?

   i suspect i just need to spend a few hours reading man pages, and
fedora wiki pages, and testing.

rday