[Yum] Come on! Removing 182 RPMs for hal?

[Jim Perrin]

On 7/11/07, Wayne Sweatt <sweatt at lanl.gov> wrote:
> Dear Yum Team,
> I've been promoting the use of Yum here for managing our Fedora 3-6
> and RHEL 4 systems for several months now, and we've had some issues
> that we've worked around, but NOW there seems to be a big complaint
> about Yum doing one of it's basic tasks with what certainly seems to
> be irrational design.

Replying to all since you seem to feel it was warranted to send to everyone.

Rule #1: Do not shoot the messenger.

> An administrator was removing the Hal daemon package(s) and Yum
> decided it needed to remove 182 packages. I mean.. really!

Yum doesn't really decide these things, the rpm database does. While
it's possible there's a bug or two in yum, have you made any attempt
to verify that this is indeed an issue by attempting the removal with
rpm directly, thus verifying the ungodly dependency list?

>
> This was on a RHEL 4 (update 3) system, with an "Everything" install
> (originally)

I'll leave my personal feelings about 'everything' installs being a
horrifyingly bad idea out of this.

>
> The yum command was:
>
> "yum remove hal hal-devel"
>
> The Yum dependency resolution determined that the removal of 182 RPMs
> was necessary - as seen below.
>
> Our admin killed the process before Yum butchered too much of the
> system's packages.

Here's a question... the default behavior for yum is to verify before
doing something. Why didn't your admin simply click 'n' to tell yum
this is NOT what it should do?

> How in the world can this list be valid?
> kernel-utils? anaconda? firefox? system-config-* ?
> Please explain/help?

This question should really be going to your distribution. (By the
way, RHEL 4 doesn't ship with yum. Is this a centos box, or was yum
installed after the fact? )

RPM is what decides the package dependencies, which to a very large
degree depends on how they were packaged to begin with. If these
applications were built against HAL, then they likely need/want
something within hal installed so that all the bits work together as
expected. If you don't like or approve of this, you should file a bug
with your distro of choice.

On a RHEL 5 system (what I had handy at present) HAL is linked to
NetworkManager, several gnome packages, smartmontools, and more. Each
of those may depend on other packages as well, and etc, etc.

I would recommend checking the dependencies manually with rpm, and
then if yum is infact being overly aggressive, then please let folks
know, or file a bug against your distribution.

If you'd like more assistance, please provide information as to which
version of yum you're using, since yum doesn't come with the distro
you listed above.



-- 
During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
George Orwell