Groups in PackageKit are just used as categorization, not as any sort of indicator of "this set of software is installed". This makes adding something new significantly more difficult (and removing even worse).
What's the use case? For installed, we do this as a filter, not as a group.
The use case is knowing "do I have support for authoring and publishing installed". Or "I want to remove KDE".
Okay, both valid use cases. For this I think we need more API (urgh) to do things like: InstallGroup(s=group) RemoveGroup(s=group) GetGroups() Group(s=group, b=installed) Would this do what we need?
That plus a way to tell which packages are 'recommended/required' for a group, and which are associated with a group, but optional. ie: I click 'Install GNOME', and I get a certain subset of packages. Some of these are Required for gnome, and some are in the gnome group, but don't have to be installed to get GNOME (I can go and unselect/remove them manually). There's still a third set of packages that are associated with the gnome group, but aren't installed automatically if I choose to install GNOME. This functionality might be better off in an installer that works at an application level instead of at a package level.
We're discussing this on the mailing list at the moment if you want to jump in. The archive link is here: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/packagekit/2008-May/002999.html
Changing version to '9' as part of upcoming Fedora 9 GA. More information and reason for this action is here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping
*** Bug 450021 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Richard - The IBM internal enterprise deployment is particularly interested in the ability to perform a `yum groupinstall "IBM Open Client"` Our use case is to install an "IBM Open Client" layer above the distro. This layer consists of a variety of yum groups of IBM Lotus products - Notes, Symphony, Sametime and variety of IBM enterprise integration configurations. We have defined about 20 yum groups (and matching comps.xml groups). These internal IBM layers are deployed to a global internal infrastructure of repository mirrors. Depending on the business role of the IBMer, they may or may not have a combination of these 20-odd groups. We want to programmatically control these roles through calls via dbus to a PackageKit API.
Done using collections and a GetCategories group method.
I've been following the discussion and implementation of collections in the PackageKit mailing list. Many thanks to Richard/Tim L for their work in making installation of yum groups easier to handle in Gnome PackageKit.