Group tag standardization

[Lewis Rosenthal]

As our collection of packages has grown, the need for better organization has become greater. Most of our packages utilize the Group tag, but I'm not clear as to what standard we follow. For example, Fedora has an optional Group tag, and ​few explicit categories, while openSUSE has a ​much more detailed list. Mageia has yet a different set of ​standard group tags. Some other packages of ours (virtual ones, such as the netlabs-rel, netlabs-exp, os2-base, os2-mpts) have no group tag at all.

YUMIE (still under development) has the ability to filter the package list based upon group, so this is a working example of where these tags will be used.

I'm happy to add the necessary page to the rpm wiki here once we agree on a reasonable standard (and it doesn't have to be one of the existing ones; for example, I would suggest a group of "Virtual" for the virtual packages).

[Yuri Dario]

Almost all our spec files are coming from Fedora. As suggested in above link, the query returns this list of actually used groups:

rpm -qa --qf '%{group}\n' "*"

Applications/Archiving?
Applications/Databases?
Applications/File?
Applications/Internet?
Applications/Publishing?
Applications/System?
Applications/Text?
Development/C
Development/Languages?
Development/Libraries?
Development/Libraries?/C and C++
Development/Other?
Development/Tools?
Documentation
Libraries
Productivity/Archiving/Compression?
System Environment/Base?
System Environment/Daemons?
System Environment/libraries
System Environment/Libraries?
System Environment/Shells?
System/Libraries?
Unspecified
User Interface/X

I see that top level categories are matching both fedora and opensuse.

[Lewis Rosenthal]

Thanks, Yuri. I'll just ask Alex to chime in here before reviewing/updating RPM How-To for packagers.

Any thoughts on how we might better group the unspecified packages (virtual ones, such as os2-base, etc.)?

[Lewis Rosenthal]

Added group tag section to RPM How-To for packagers, including external reference (revision 30). Just keeping this open in case there are any comments.

[Alex Taylor]

The list itself looks fine. I guess it's most important to put packages into groups that are reasonably intuitive, i.e. where an 'average' user would reasonably expect to find what they're looking for (at least within a couple of tries).

I notice that a lot of runtimes (e.g. 'emxrt') are put into 'Development/'whatever rather than under 'Libraries'. That seems counterintuitive to me, since runtimes are not primarily developer tools, but required by end-users as well.

Incidentally, while it displays the entire group name in the list, YUMIE only allows filtering on the top-level group node ('Applications', 'Development', etc.), otherwise the UI would just become too complex. That means the top-level group name is what the user will mainly be aware of.

So, going back to the previous example, if the user is searching for the EMX runtime they would probably first look in 'Libraries', and not find it (rather than under 'Development', where it actually is).

[Silvan Scherrer]

please add all proposed changes here. We might then change them.

[Silvan Scherrer]

Please add a ticket for every proposed change, like in #126.
As having one ticket for all possible changes doesn't work.

Could we close this then?

[Silvan Scherrer]

I close this one. Please open a new ticket for every group tag you want to have changed.

And as a remark: we follow Fedora.