On Friday 01 April 2005 22:39, Michael Stenner wrote: > No. This is an interesting concept. There is an obvious case when > this is undesirable. Lets say foo depends on bar. If the user never > uses bar directly, and nothing else depends on bar, then it's great to > remove it when you remove foo. For example, it might be nice to have > xmms-mp3 go away when I remove xmms. However, what if the user DOES > use bar directly. This can't show up as a dep, of course. For > example, k3b depends on cdrecord. > > Don't get me wrong. I'm not criticizing the option. I'm just curious > how often the scenario I describe is an issue. > Gentoo handles this using what it calls a 'world' file. Basically, all packages that were installed directly are entered into this file, but all it's dependencies aren't. When removing any package the entry is removed from world if it existed. At any time the user can run a 'depclean', which would remove packages that are installed but aren't a dependency (directly or indirectly) of anything entered in the world file. It's far from perfect or automatic though. With the k3b example- if cdrecord was originally installed as a dependency to k3b, then k3b was uninstalled and cdrecord only was wanted, cdrecord would have to be entered manually into the world file, otherwise a depclean would want to uninstall it as well. It's a decent way of keeping cruft under control in gentoo, but I don't know if it's even a good idea in the yum/redhat world. -JayKim
