yum and yum-updatesd in Rawhide

seth vidal skvidal at fedoraproject.org
Tue Feb 5 07:09:13 UTC 2008


On Sun, 2008-02-03 at 14:21 -0800, Andrew Farris wrote:
> A thought for Seth:
> Wouldn't it be possible for the groupremove operation to handle this with 
> information it already has?  If a package is added to a remove operation list 
> because the original command given is a groupremove, then any packages that are 
> also listed in another group (that is installed) should be skipped over in the 
> remove operation.  It means retracing over the remove list once the reverse deps 
> are solved and checking whether each package is a member of an installed group 
> other than the one being removed.

The problem is we get into a "do what I mean" weird case:

 Did the user type 'groupremove foo' b/c they wanted to remove all the
pkgs in foo, regardless of whether or not they exist in other groups? Or
did they type 'groupremove foo' b/c they just wanted the pkgs in this
group, not used by other things, to be removed?

And you end up fighting between those two classes of users.


> Handling it in that way might be extremely slow, but it shouldn't require 
> another database of information for context on how the package was originally 
> installed right?  Assume if its part of more than one *installed group* then 
> leave it in place during the first groupremove.

Again - that's great for YOUR case but the way I used to use groups was
to make a host into a profile based on the groups it has available.

so when I said groupremove 'physics beowulf' I MEANT remove all of the
pkgs in that group, regardless.

> 
> You'll get the result of any packages that exist only because they are a member 
> of the group being removed are removed, and any dependencies those packages 
> pulled in will be removed only if they are listed in no other group that is 
> installed.  Would that end up leaving any cruft behind?

Of course it'll leave cruft behind, depending on your definition of
cruft. My definition of cruft includes anything I didn't intend to leave
installed and my intention as explained above was to remove everything I
specified. If I didn't want all the contents of the group to be removed
I wouldn't have typed 'groupremove' at all.

I don't have any objection with making the commands smarter based on
more context information. I just want to be clear about what 'smarter'
actually looks like. To a number of people 'smarter' is actually
second-guessing the user and therefore dumber

think about the problem from that perspective some.

-sv





More information about the fedora-devel-list mailing list