[Yum] My problem is not removing it is keeping

[Matthew Miller]

On Mon, Jul 02, 2007 at 03:12:42PM -0700, Larry C Robinson wrote:
> To me it seems that yum will not remove a particular package without 
> removing most of the packages.  I can try to remove; for instance 
> dmraid, but it will remove most of my GUI.  I know of a way with rpm to 

This is not a yum problem. The only way you could do this removal with RPM
is by saying "--nodeps", which is effectively a way of saying "break my
system please".

> remove just that package but, I would like some of the other packages to 
> go with it. It seems we are caught between the rpm way and learn what 
> each package does and to what or, the yum way and have all removed with 
> no choices.  Yes they all have these links but, I know some, or most, 
> can survive on the system very well without that other one.  If Linux is 
> about choice then give us back more choice.

The dependencies are defined within the RPMs packaged for your distribution.
Some times, the defined dependencies are not hard requirements but just
required to enable some feature -- but usually, it's a good idea to trust
the people who put the requirement there, because they may know something
important that isn't obvious.

In the dmraid case, dmraid is needed by mkinitrd, which is needed whenever
you install a new kernel. It's possible that this dependency isn't really
necessary, since the failure case is "raid won't work", which won't
bother you if you have no raid devices anyway. You could take that issue up
with the maintainer of your distribution.

-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org          <http://mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>              <http://linux.bu.edu/>