On Jan 25, 2005, Jeff Johnson <n3npq@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Alexandre Oliva wrote: >> Having package installers pin user-selected packages, or unpin >> packages brought in only to satisfy dependencies, would enable all >> cases to work, not only the shared library case, even without a >> special provides or the too-inclusive mechanism proposed by jeff. > The concept of "pinning" can will stop a depsolver from unattended, > batch mode, > upgrades. Not the same pinning. I'm talking about adding a bit that would tell whether a particular package was requested by the user or brought in just to satisfy a dependency of another package. Packages of the latter group that no longer have any dependency in the database may be garbage collected. Packages of the former group shouldn't. > The pain that you -- an active nerd ;-) -- might be willing to > accomodate and tolerate is very different from what most users > are willing to tolerate. An QA on upgrades in the face of "pinning" is > way way more complex. We're talking about different sorts of pinning. Please re-read my suggestion with the paragraph I wrote above in mind, and hopefully it will make sense, and not seem too complicated of a concept. > Erasing unused packages has never been seriously attempted, mostly > because the primary goal of installers and depsolvers is > Upgrade! > not otherwise. Yeah, but this discussion got into the topic of removing unused packages. A number of different heuristics were suggested, but all of them were not more than heuristics. What I suggest (marking packages in the database as having been brought in only to satisfy dependencies) would enable such packages to be easily located and removed when other packages that caused them to be brought in are removed. -- Alexandre Oliva http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/ Red Hat Compiler Engineer aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org} Free Software Evangelist oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
