devel packages

[Jason Dravet]

>On Wed, 13 Oct 2004, Jason Dravet wrote:
>
>> I just completed a custom install of FC3T3 and I ended up with 39 devel
>> packages on my PC.  I then went to up2date the system and there are 226
>> updates, 6 of which are devel updates.  One of the updates is rpm-devel
>> (3.3MB).  Some of the others are: glibc-devel (2MB), libgcj-devel (6.7MB)
>> and libstdc++-devel (8.7MB).  I went to command prompt and rpm -e
rpm->>devel
>> and the package was erased.  There was no warning about a package being
>> dependent on the rpm-devel package so why was it installed?  Do I really
>> need the devel packages?  For those of us with dial up it would nice if
>>FC
>> did not any unnecessary devel packages.  
>>
>You don't have to have this installed, but at least back in RH 9 it 
>contained some nice utilities like rpmdb_stat and friends, which can be 
>usefull when diagnosing problems with rpm, but since rpm is bug free you 
>should never need that (-;
>
>Where I work we have some home grown upgrade scripts, and one of the 
>things they do is check the state of the rpm database using rpmdb_stat to 
>verify that there are no locks on the db.  No sense in starting an upgrade
>that may fail because of a stale lock.
>
>Cheers...james 

Thanks for the tip.  Since I am stuck with dial up, it is more important to
me to remove large packages that are not necessary so they don't have to be
updated.  My ISP limits me to a 2 hour connect time (with a forced
disconnect after 2 hours) and has a 8hr max connect time per day.

Jason