On Monday 29 March 2010 13:00:23 Marko Vojinovic wrote:
On Monday 29 March 2010 08:34:58 Ed Greshko wrote:
> A previous post prompted me to try removing various language groups via
> yum. I was surprised when this happened after doing yum groupremove
> "Tajik Support"....
[snip complete openoffice suite]
Well of course, Tajik Support is completely crucial for any core Linux
functionality, didn't you know? :-D
Seriously, the culprit is here is dejavu-sans-fonts, it seems. From the yum
dependency resolution,
--> Processing Dependency: dejavu-sans-fonts for package: 1:openoffice.org-
core-3.1.1-19.28.fc12.x86_64
so anything openoffice* depends on it. However, the same package is listed
under "mandatory" section in yum groupinfo "Tajik Support":
Group: Tajik Support
Mandatory Packages:
dejavu-sans-fonts
Default Packages:
dejavu-sans-mono-fonts
dejavu-serif-fonts
Conditional Packages:
kde-l10n-Tajik
I don't know what "mandatory" means in this context, but I guess when you
try to remove the whole group, yum tries to remove the dejavu fonts as
well, creating a cascade.
> This deserves a bugzilla....but I wonder what component would be best to
> file it under. Does anyone know for sure?
I would guess that the "Tajik Support" group is the culprit here, but I'm
not sure this is actually a bug. While not being certain how the concept
of a "group" actually works, my guess is that if you want to remove the
*whole* group, it removes the *whole* group.
Maybe someone can explain how to remove the group without removing all of
it's packages?
Actually, I've been wondering even before about this --- if I yum
groupinstall some group, then remove some individual package which is a
part of that group, does that mean that the group is still installed or
not? It is unclear to me what criterion defines that a group is installed,
since one can have only some of its packages installed. Fuzzy.
As a workaround, I guess yum groupremove "Tajik Support" followed by yum
install openoffice* would not drag in the complete Tajik support again, but
just the dejavu-sans-fonts package which is needed.
Ok, found it --- the man yum says:
<quote>
grouplist
Is used to list the available groups from all yum repos. Groups are marked as
"installed" if all mandatory packages are installed, or if a group doesn’t
have any mandatory packages then it is installed if any of the
optional or default package are installed.
</quote>
So in this case, whenever you have the dejavu-sans-fonts installed, you
automatically have "Tajik Support" group installed, by definition. And since
openoffice depends on dejavu-sans-fonts, it really turns out that "Tajik
Support" is a necessary dependency for openoffice.
Yeah, very funny... ;-)
Also, there is another relevant remark in man yum:
<quote>
groupremove
Is used to remove all of the packages in a group, unlike "groupinstall" this
will remove everything regardless of group_package_types. It is worth pointing
out that packages can be in more than one group, so "groupinstall X Y"
followed by "groupremove Y" does not do give you the same result as
"groupinstall X".
</quote>
Illuminating, what can I say? Set theory in action... ;-)
Best, :-)
Marko