[Yum] Removing a package and also the packages required by it

Michael Stenner mstenner at ece.arizona.edu
Thu Aug 3 00:14:32 UTC 2006


On Wed, Aug 02, 2006 at 11:12:20PM +0100, Paul Smith wrote:
> This is just to suggest an enhancement: yum should be able to
> automatically (and by option of the user)

These seem contradictory.  You mean like "yum removedeps foobar"?

> remove a package and *also* the packages required* by it. That
> feature would greatly help us to keep clean our Linux installation.

I doubt it.  I'm betting it would make a big smoking mess of your
installation.  How do you know WHICH deps to remove?  Surely you don't
want to remove them all because removing anything would take glibc
with it.  Anything that has no OTHER requiring packages?  What about
user apps that happen to be required by other things as well (wget,
for example).

There's just no way to do this cleanly.  I'm betting any
implementation would be wrong (in the sense of doing what the user
wanted) more often than it was right.

					-Michael

P.S.  This has been discussed before.  Anyone who wants to debate it
should spend a little time searching the archives first.
-- 
  Michael D. Stenner                            mstenner at ece.arizona.edu
  ECE Department and Optical Sciences Center                520-626-1619
  University of Arizona                                         ECE 524G



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