Re: [NEW IDEA] Automatic removal of dependencies

[Horst von Brand <vonbrand inf utfsm cl>]

Mark Rosenstand <mark borkware net> wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-04-22 at 06:30 -0700, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> > Checking the dependencies is the easy part. What gets less trivial is 
> > things like this:
> > 
> > [pmatilai cs181072240 ~]$ rpm -e --test grub
> > [pmatilai cs181072240 ~]$
> > 
> > Oops, nothing needs grub, so it can be removed safely, right?

> The Debian tool assumes that its users are capable of brain activity.

Riiight...

>                                                                       I
> don't know if this is a problem in the Fedora case.

You haven't met many end users, have you?
[In any case, a tool like this is completely useless if it /forces/ the
 user to know about the stuff they have installed... that's 1284 packages
 currently here, I sure don't know what each one of them does. I'd be real
 pressed to name more than a hundred. Forget about dependencies...]

>                                                     Anyway, it does have
> a couple of more options than Y/n, one of them being 'i' which prints
> the description of the package, so it's easy to get a pretty good clue
> if you're uncertain whether you need the package.

> Of course this is where the "explicitly installed" attribute is useful.
> I assume glibc, grub, udev etc. are all explicitly installed by
> anaconda.

And why should one not be able to also look at "explicitly installed"
stuff? Each Linux user goes through the "a distribution a week" phase, the
next one is usually the "install everything" that makes for regular
flamewars here, spiced up with "... what I can put my hands on"...
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
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