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

[Michael Stenner]

On Thu, Aug 03, 2006 at 01:32:05AM +0100, Paul Smith wrote:
> On 8/3/06, Michael Stenner <mstenner at ece.arizona.edu> wrote:
> >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.

Just to augment what Panu said and reply to this point specifically...
Yum has traditionally favored 'safe and reliable behavior' over
'powerful features'.  There are actually many features found in other
packaged managers that are very handy for experienced power-users but
can easily reduce a box to cinders if used badly.  Yum generally takes
the conservative route.  It's not good or bad, it's just a design
choice.

I don't doubt that "recursive remove" can be done, and even done in a
way that makes many power users happy.  I do have serious doubts about
whether it can be done SAFELY for inexperienced users.  Recently, yum
utils (other programs using the yum modules) and yum plugins (optional
bits which modify yum's behavior) have sprouted up and those are good
places for more wacky features.

					-Michael
-- 
  Michael D. Stenner                            mstenner at ece.arizona.edu
  ECE Department and Optical Sciences Center                520-626-1619
  University of Arizona                                         ECE 524G