In answer to http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2008-August/007644.html
To Ronald :
It is nice you worked on this, especially considering it was a feature request posted by Aaron himself : http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/7132
However, I warmly recommend you to have a look at this : http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman_Development
Especially the submitting patches page. And all the git guides.
1) you should really use git for doing pacman development 2) it it is a good idea to split patches, especially huge ones like this 3) all pacman development happens on pacman-dev, not arch-dev-public 4) all big patches go through the ML for review and discussion. Even Dan sometimes sends his own patches (the less trivial ones) there
To everyone :
About the feature itself, here is the last thread where it was discussed : http://archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/2007-June/008555.html I was always divided about it. I understand the point of view "groups are installable, categories are not" However, after having a look at this patch, it seems like it justifies Nagy's opinion even more : http://archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/2007-June/008565.html This category implementation basically looks like a duplication of the whole group implementation.
In alpm a group is simply a set of packages (with a given "set name", like xorg). Nothing more. (The front-end does the group specific operations, the back-end just stores our "sets".) Tag or category is just an other _type_ of sets (type A: group, type B: category...). The question is, whether we need this? Imho not. (If someone wants to implement categories, he can use "category:multimedia" group (== set) names and hack some "interpreter" to front-end. But I think we don't need this distinction at all, see my linked opinion: IMHO the meaning of "group" and "category" are similar). Bye