Is yum dependency resolution upside down?
Klaus Pedersen
projectu at gmail.com
Mon Jun 13 04:55:02 UTC 2011
I don't know if it is yum, the package group definitions or the package
dependencies that are wrong - but no matter who is to blame - the result is
definitely not intuitive (or imho correct)...
After being hit by a fatal error in preupgrade, I am now unable to re-run the
upgrade because of low memory[1][2].
To recover memory[3] I have tried to remove some package groups - but the
results are most surprising (and quite useless).
Below are a few examples:
# yum -C groupremove "Dial-up Networking Support"
Is removing "ppp" - and NetworkManager for dependencies:
----------------------
Removing:
ppp i686 2.4.5-12.fc14 @updates 752 k
Removing for dependencies:
NetworkManager i686 1:0.8.4-1.fc14 @updates 5.5 M
NetworkManager-gnome i686 1:0.8.4-1.fc14 @updates 1.5 M
NetworkManager-openvpn i686 1:0.8.1-1.fc14 @anaconda-InstallationRepo-201010211
NetworkManager-vpnc i686 1:0.8.1-1.fc14 @anaconda-InstallationRepo-201010211
----------------------
NetworkManager is part of (installed) "System Tools" group - not dial-up modem
so why does it even consider to remove it?
# yum -C groupremove "Electronic Lab"
* Is (correctly) removing "drawtiming" and "openocd"
* surprisingly also "eclipse*" and "xorg-x11-fonts*" and "xscreensaver*"
for dependencies(!!)
eclipse was installed with "Fedora Eclipse" group.
# yum -C groupremove "Text-based Internet"
* Unsurprisingly suggest removing: bittorrent, cadaver, elinks, fetchmail, ...
* But for dependencies: docbook-utils*, evolution-data-server-devel,
gnome-*-devel, libgnome*-devel, gtk-doc, xulrunner-devel(!)
I wonder how all the gnome development lib dependencies popped up here...
# yum -C groupremove "Java Development"
* Unsurprisingly suggest to remove a lot of java development stuff.
* But quite surprising for dependencies also eclipse* and openoffice.org-base*
- for example: eclipse-cdt, eclipse-oprofile, eclipse-systemtapgui
eclipse-linuxprofilingframework, ...
Notice - this is not the "Java" group - in which case the eclipse and ooo-base
stuff would have been fine.
and my favorite:
# yum -C remove wine
========================================================================
Removing:
wine i686 1.3.19-1.fc14 @updates 0.0
Transaction Summary
========================================================================
Remove 1 Package(s)
Installed size: 0
I guess I just have to reinstall the system....
BR, Klaus
[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=712750
[2] the system is low on memory because a lot of packages are duplicated in
fc14 and fc15 versions.
[3] I tried to run "yum history undo last-1" - but that wanted to download and
reinstall 700MB worth of packages(!)
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