[Yum-devel] group DB

[James Antill]

On Tue, 2009-05-26 at 15:21 -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> On Tuesday, May 26 2009, Seth Vidal said:
> > On Fri, 22 May 2009, 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 :).
> [snip]
> >> ...a couple of things that fall out of this:
> >>
> >> i. You can have all the packages for a group installed, but the group
> >> not installed.
> 
> This has in the past been a contention from a UI perspective

 In what way?
 What else do you suggest?
 Personally I don't think we can easily have some blend of what we do
now and "groups as user objects", and this should be understandable as
"yes, group X isn't installed ... because you didn't install it".

> >> ii. You can have a group installed, but no packages from that group
> >> installed.
> 
> And this definitely feels weird.  What does having the group "installed"
> mean then?

 Overall I think the main thing is to treat groups as entities and not
just a collection of packages. Specifically here I think the main
advantage is that if you have a group installed then on "yum update"
aka. YumBase.update(), if there are packages added to the group that you
don't have installed, you get the new packages for the group.
 I agree it seems like a weird thing to have an installed group which
doesn't actually do anything, but I think this would not be common. Much
more likely is to have a group installed but have 1 or 2 packages
removed/blacklisted/whatever.

> Doing this via some yum-only-database still feels like we're going to
> get into trouble for all the reasons we had talked about back in January

 I can almost buy this for the problems yumdb solves, because it'd kind
of fit into the rpmdb API.
 But for groups it'd be such a huge hack to stick it in the rpmdb that
any other package manager wishing to use it will be in just as much pain
as if they play in /var/lib/yum/groups directly. IMO.

-- 
James Antill <james at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora