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

[Paul Smith]

On 8/3/06, Michael Stenner <mstenner at ece.arizona.edu> 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"?

Yes, that is what I mean.

> > 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.

Thanks, Michael. I am not an expert and I am not able to discuss about
the pros and cons. I only wanted to contribute with an idea to improve
yum for its users. However, I see that synaptic has the feature of
'complete removal', which is able of removing some dependencies
together with the package itself.

Paul