On Tue, 2018-05-29 at 12:45 +0200, Tomas Chvatal wrote:
Hi all,
We have pretty strict requirements how the group tags are shown. [0]
But there are only 2 ways to use it, 1) yast view based on groups 2) using rpm -q to get information for the individual package. For all other purposes from zypp/packagekit this stuff is ignored.
I'm using the rpm Group tag as a way to index software in Package Hub by pseudo category since there is nothing else I could find within the repo data to do the job. It's not perfect, but better than nothing: https://packagehub.suse.com/package-categories/archiving/
In general it does not really make sense to install packages based on groups. As Fedora already deprecated this tag it would make sense for us to drop it too [1][2].
Proposed change would be to kill the Yast UI and then have spec-cleaner to drop the part where needed. It won't break on older releases as it would simply have Undefined as a group.
What would be the alternative for grouping and indexing the software in the distro by some form of categories? I had once thought about suggesting that we start using .desktop files with proper categories for every RPM, but I'm not sure if that makes sense for anything outside of desktop applications. Is there a different standard we can leverage? The other option would be to maintain a database of tags/categories outside of the rpms for "app-store" type interfaces like software.o.o or the Package Hub website. But a centralized database would really be nice vs everyone baking their own. I'm not opposed to killing the tag, but would like to see a better option. -Scott
Cheers
Tom
[0] https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Package_group_guidelines [1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines#Tags_and_Sectio ns [2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RPMGroups