[NEW IDEA] Automatic removal of dependencies

[Lamont R. Peterson]

On Tuesday 25 April 2006 07:19am, Michael A. Peters wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-04-22 at 00:50 +0100, Leon wrote:
> > I think you didn't get the idea right.
> >
> > Basically they want to divide packages (of course installed by package
> > manager; those installed using source, the user has to track
> > themselves) into two groups: one is installed by the user (explicitly
> > 'yum install') and the other is those required to satisfy the
> > dependence.
> >
> > Ubuntu put this *high* priority for the next release after
> > dapper. After reading its wiki page, it make sense to me. And I
> > believe it will be useful.
>
> I want the mathml-fonts fonts installed.
> I know that "yum install abiword" which I also want will grab them as a
> dependency.
>
> But suppose I decide that I'm not using AbiWord anymore because I'm
> doing everything in LaTeX. So I remove AbiWord.
>
> mathml-fonts I still want though - but it was installed as a dependency
> to abiword, which I have since removed.
>
> Does that mean mathml-fonts will get automatically removed out from
> under me?

That's why I never never run "yum -y remove splat" ("yum -y install splat" for 
that matter).

In such a situation, it would be very nice to be able to selectively "uncheck" 
packages from the dependency list that were automatically selected for 
removal, too.  But that's probably best handled by the GUI if you want it to 
be interactive.  On the command line (i.e., just the yum command), I would 
say "n" to removing the packages, yum exits, I press the Up Arrow key and 
edit the line to read "yum --exclude=mathml-fonts remove splat".

Then again, I don't believe that any application package should "depend" on 
font packages, in general.  However, it the automatic removal selection 
mechanism is added to yum, it should be possible to mark "soft" dependencies 
in an RPM (like an Include: directive, for example) that says, "Hey, it's 
good to also include that package when you install this one."

Of course, I just opened a very XL can-o-worms there, didn't I?

Just to be clear, though, I'm for the idea of automatic dependency resolution 
for removal.  If nothing else depends on a package once those items that did 
are removed, why keep the clutter around?  I know disk space is _really_ 
cheap, but I still like to keep my systems tidy.
-- 
Lamont R. Peterson <lamont at gurulabs.com>
Senior Instructor
Guru Labs, L.C. [ http://www.GuruLabs.com/ ]
GPG Key fingerprint: F98C E31A 5C4C 834A BCAB  8CB3 F980 6C97 DC0D D409
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