[Mageia-dev] RPM groups policy

Thu Sep 27 11:48:22 CEST 2012

Le 27/09/12 10:04,Colin Guthrie nous adresse ces quelques mots :
+> Just ran into my first practical problem and would like your feedback.
+
+I'm guessing your email is just the first of a long list :-).
+The new RPM group will indeed cause some head scratching for many packages.
+
+> PulseAudio packages used to just be in "Sound" group, but now I have to
+> sub-categorise them as Sound/*. This is fine and I put everything in the
+> Sound/Mixer category for now as this is one of the tasks PA does, mix
+> your audio, but I get the feeling this group was more designed to
+> represent graphical mixer UIs rather than infrastructure level stuff.
+
+RPM groups are for users, not necessarily technical users (technical
+users already know which packages interest them).
+So the main advice to find the category of a given package is:
+
+Where would it make sense for a user browsing through a list to find it?
+
+For PulseAudio, Sound/Mixer is fine.
+
+> Should there be a group that represents this better? e.g.
+> 
+> Sound/Plumbing
+> System/Sound
+> Plumbing/Sound
+
+Or Sound/PulseAudio ... :-P
+
+That's the Suse approach, but it does not work. It only multiplies the
+groups, with 3 or 4 subdivision depths (Amusements/Games/Strategy/Turn
+Based ...), with some groups only having a handful of packages. Many of
+the subdivisions make sense from a packaging point of view, but from a
+user point of view it makes browsing too precise. I personally think
+that groups are meant for the exploration by people who don't know what
+they are looking for.
+
+> Or perhaps PA should just go in System/Base?
+
+No. It only drowns it in the crowd of completely unrelated packages.
+
+> (I use the term Plumbing as this is quite common these days as an off
+> shoot perhaps from the Linux Plumbers Conference where the various
+> infrastructural bits of linux are discussed).
+> 
+> Thoughts?
+
+No RPM group classification is perfect. There will always be a package
+that does not fit the classification. So we should stick to the "best
+guess" strategy for now.
+
+The new RPM group policy is not completely fixed, but I propose that
+everyone tries to stick with it until Beta 1, at which point we can
+review it and amend the most obvious problems.
+
+Cheers,
+-- 
+Malo
+