On Sunday 17 January 2010 19:53:17 Petrus de Calguarium wrote: > So, I guess, as was pointed out, I do sometimes need bindings, even merely > to run a program, not only to write it. I guess to be more precise: Yes, you need this binding libraries if you happen to run program that needs them. This should be taken care of by dependencies when you install the program that needs the binding libraries via 'yum' or 'rpm' (someone correct me if that's not the case). Otherwise, no, you don't need to have various python or whatever language binding installed in your system if you don't plan to develop software or write program that uses particular binding libraries. > Is there a way to know which of the myriad bindings packages I need to > install on my system? Not sure, on top of my head. As you said yourself, yum should take care of it. If yum didn't , then it'd be obvious when you try to run some program and get an error of some libraries not found. > What about when I run rpm -e some-binding? Does rpm know that > some-binding.rpm was pulled in by yum for some other program? It should. "rpm" knows about dependencies. It shouldn't allow you to remove something by doing "rpm -e some-binding" if that particular package is needed by other program. > I had a fair number of these bindings on my system, of the form x-python, > y-python, z-python and so on. I never explicitly installed them, so yum > must have pulled them in as dependencies for some program, but when I > installed kde-4.3.90, there were problems that I managed to resolve with > rpm -e x-python y-python z-python etc. Did you maybe install "Software Development" group during initial install ? Not sure. > rpm allowed me to remove them, so what happened? Did rpm 'forget' that they > were dependencies, or are they no longer dependencies? rpm itself knows about dependencies, so if the package were set up correctly it shouldn't let you remove a package via "rpm -e package" if it's needed by other thing. Yum actually just helps you pulls rpm packages that you need, but the dependencies information itself is in rpm (someone correct me if I am wrong here). AC
