Group operations

Referring to the tree configuration we explained in section 5.1.3, PackageFS users are able to achieve other goals than browsing packages by categories or priorities.

Even if all the presented package managers support multiple packages installation, they do not provide operations on whole packages groups. Only RPM supplies facilities to easily display all packages belonging to a group and to find a group by package name. Anyway a user must have some skill in shell scripting language to perform tasks on the given output (like for Slackware find operation described in table 5.7). In PackageFS the users may be totally unaware of scripting: if the file system has been mounted with the appropriate settings, an administrator can, for example, drag-and-drop the available section directory into the $\texttt{INSTALL}$ one. In this way, he installs all the packages belonging to that category. In terminal fashion, some operations may be:

• $\texttt{cp -a AVAILABLE/<section> INSTALL/}$ which has been just described;
• $\texttt{rm -rf INSTALL/<section>}$ : it removes each package belonging to the specified section;
• $\texttt{ls [AVAILABLE,INSTALL]/<section>}$ : it shows respectively the available or the installed packages for a section;
• $\texttt{find AVAILABLE/-name}$ pkg : it shows the section that pkg belongs to.

Obviously we can refer either to sections or priorities or also to both nested subdirectories. Maybe in newer versions this feature will be extended to whatever set of packages the package manager provides.