Adam Williamson wrote:
> While doing this extremely tedious task, it occurred to me to think:
> what the hell is the *point* of these 'optional' entries any more,
> anyway?

They are required for Dnfdragora to list the available packages in a 
categorized manner. Dropping them without replacement is clearly the wrong 
approach, it will badly break Dnfdragora. (Experience with Apper has shown 
that users see browsing groups as an absolutely required feature of a 
package manager. The uncategorized "all packages" list or searches by name 
or description are not suitable replacements for most users.)

If we see maintaining comps as too much of a burden (which is somewhat true, 
because it requires touching files outside of the packages, which has become 
even more tedious when the move to Pagure removed write permissions to the 
comps repository from almost all packagers, forcing us to go through pull 
requests), then we should just undeprecate the RPM Group tag and move back 
to that. Dnfdragora already supports Group tags out of the box. (In fact, 
moving to them would allow Dnfdragora upstream to remove the special-case 
code for Fedora.)

The rationale for deprecating RPM Group tags was that comps should be used 
instead. But if we want to get rid of that use of comps (since a comps 
without optional packages is no longer a suitable replacement for Group 
enumeration! A lot of packages that users will want to install will not be 
listed there anymore), what speaks against using Group again?

So I see only 2 alternatives:
a) keep comps as it is now, including optional packages, OR
b) undeprecate the RPM Group tag, readd it to all Fedora packages, and
   switch back to it.
Any other plan will completely break Dnfdragora.

        Kevin Kofler
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