[pacman-dev] Groups. Again.

[Xavier]

Xyne wrote:
> 
> I'm re-proposing that we scrap groups entirely in favor of metapackages. (I
> think I send a message to this list about this over a year ago.)
> 
> 
> A metapackage would consist of an empty package (i.e. no installable files
> other than pacman metadata). The package would list the members of the
> metapackage as optdepends.
> 
> I would really like to hear some thoughts about this approach from the devs.
> 

If it was up to me, I would kill groups ... *and* optdepends altogether. 
Keep it simple.

A metapackage would consist of an empty package (i.e. no installable files other
than pacman metadata). The package would list the members of the metapackage as
depends.

Whenever you are not happy about one litte depend being installed, apply these
two steps :
1) Ask yourself whether it's really going to cause a world end to have it
installed. If it is, see 2)
2) Improve the packages

If you do 2) often enough, maybe you'll end up with something which is actually
suitable for space constrained systems and different enough from Arch.
I don't think a distrib that ships headers, docs and locales is suitable
anyway..