Hi,
You are probably already familiar with the concept of groupinstall in
yum which allows for example, installing LXDE desktop environment in one
go.
# yum grouplist - shows a list of groups
# yum groupinstall "SUGAR Desktop Environment" - installs sugar
environment developed for OLPC.
Unlike meta packages which are essentially empty packages which depends
on a set of other packages, groups (defined via comps.xml) is more
flexible and doesn't require rebuilding packages to redefine the set to
be installed and can have mandatory, default, optional and conditional
types.
The format is defined in more detail at
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/CompsXml
* Mandatory - selected by default and cannot be unselected during
installation
* Default - selected by default but can be unselected
* Optional - not selected by default
* Mandatory - selected depending on the presence of other packages
The last one is interesting. If you want say, Hindi support, you can do
# yum groupinstall hindi-support
This can optionally pull in the Openoffice.org hindi support sub-package
depending on whether or not, Openoffice.org was already installed. yum
groupinfo on any particular group would let you know, what each group
contains and the types of various packages as well.
Hidden groups:
-------------
Groups can also be defined as hidden by package maintainers so that it
is not normally end user visible. Language support groups are normally
hidden. If you would like to see such groups, you can do
# yum grouplist hidden
The @ trick
------------
In the good old days of up2date, groups used to be indicated with @ and
this is the same in kickstart as well. Recently this has been added to
yum as well. So instead of doing yum groupinstall foo, you can very well
do yum install @foo. This works for all the other yum commands as well.
Aliases
-------
Many of the groups have an alias defined in comps.xml file. Normally
when users want to figure out, how to install a group, they do a yum
grouplist and then copy paste that to the groupinstall. Instead, if you
note the alias, it is much easier to type. Combing that with the @ trick
mentioned earlier, you can for example, do
# yum install @sugar-desktop.
This works well for say kde-desktop or lxde-desktop as well. I don't
think yum supports listing aliases directly so I generally lookup, the
xml file itself at
http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/comps/comps-f10.xml.in?view=markup
There are dozens of yum plugins if you want to list more data. We will
look at those another day. Hope that helps.
Rahul
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