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

[Panu Matilainen]

On Thu, 2006-08-03 at 01:32 +0100, Paul Smith wrote:
> 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.

See https://lists.dulug.duke.edu/pipermail/yum/2006-June/008827.html for
an explanation why this isn't as feasible as it looks like. Yes, apt-rpm
and synaptic support such an operation but it's very unsafe operation to
use and can result in a big smoking mess of a system if used without
great care.

	- Panu -