On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 7:16 AM, Matej Cepl <mcepl@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > And I am afraid there will be no real resolution of this problem, > until yum will be able to do the same thing which aptitude on > Debian was able to do for years -- remembering which package was > installed because user wanted to do so, and which one was > installed only to satisfy dependencies. Another way of thinking of things would be: rather than keeping track of what package was installed as a dependency, have which packages are "libraries" labeled in the metadata of the actual package; "libraries" being specifically defined here as packages that provide something to one or more other packages but are not inherently useful by themselves. That could include game data, plugins or base libraries ... or even some helper apps. Rather than changing the rpm database or behaviour, this might be handed just by putting the package in a specific software group. This differentiates those leaf packages from other non-library leaf packages that don't depend on anything and also are not expected to provide anything to other packages but are inherently useful all by themselves. At that point, all the information is available for package managers like yum to make intelligent decisions based on user preferences about what to do with "library" packages that are installed with no other package installed that requires them. A developer who needs libraries around to create software or someone who just has a ton of hard-drive space and isn't really interested in culling unused libraries can set a preference in their package manager of choice that tells it not to get rid of packages that are labeled as "libraries" when they are unused. Just a different perspective to change the problem from "how a package was installed?" to "what kind of package is this?". /Mike -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
