[Yum] Removing dependencies

[Panu Matilainen]

On Tue, 13 Jun 2006, seth vidal wrote:

> On Tue, 2006-06-13 at 02:25 -0300, Daniel Bolgheroni wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> are there any way to do a recursive remove of a package and all
>> packages it depends on? Something like the -R option found in pkgsrc.
>>
>> http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?pkg_delete++NetBSD-current
>>
>
> yum remove name-of-package
>
>
> yum will find all of its dependencies and confirm if you wish to remove
> them.

That'll remove the package and anything depending on it, not packages it 
depends on which is what Daniel asked for :) Eg you install package A, 
which pulls in new packages B, C and D because of C. On 'yum remove A' 
packages B, C and D will remain on the system. With something like -R 
above, B C and D would get removed as well (assuming nothing else 
depending on them has been installed in the meanwhile).

It doesn't look like a hard problem at first sight, but it is. Suppose B 
depended on something that you already had installed on your system but 
nothing else required it: it would also get removed which probably isn't 
what you wanted. To have a prayer of a chance to get it right, one would 
have to track how something got installed (direct user request or 
dependency on a given package) and use that information on removal. And 
even with that you'll have all sorts of nasty cases which are impossible 
to get 100% right in some circumstances.

 	- Panu -