[NEW IDEA] Automatic removal of dependencies

[Peter Jones]

On Fri, 2006-04-28 at 15:43 +0000, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Peter Jones <pjones <at> redhat.com> writes:
> > How do you plan on discovering this data?  During installation,
> > basically everything is the latter, or equivalent, except for packages
> > selected individually in a ks.cfg .
> 
> Well, I'd say (for an interactive install) everything with a checkmark next to 
> it (no matter whether that's because it's part of defaults of a selected group 
> and hasn't been unchecked or because it has been checked explicitly) is 
> "explicitly installed". Everything else (which either is not listed as an 
> explicit option at all or was unchecked, but had to be pulled in anyway as a 
> dependency) is "automatically installed".

So that basically means that you want to mark everything which is listed
in comps but isn't in "base" or "core" as user-installed.  That's going
to result in a view of "safe to remove" that doesn't reflect what users
want or expect.

> (Of course, that requires cooperation from the installer and from RPM. If the 
> flags are kept track of only by some higher-level app like aptitude, then 
> marking everything installed at install time "explicitly installed" is the only 
> option, and apparently that's what aptitude does.)

I think that's the only way to actually behave conservatively enough to
match user expectations.  I also think it stinks.

-- 
  Peter