[NEW IDEA] Automatic removal of dependencies

[Edward S. Marshall]

On Sat, 2006-04-22 at 00:50 +0100, Leon wrote:
> Basically they want to divide packages (of course installed by package
> manager; those installed using source, the user has to track
> themselves) into two groups: one is installed by the user (explicitly
> 'yum install') and the other is those required to satisfy the
> dependence.

See Gentoo's "emerge depclean"; portage flags whether the package was
installed explicitly or via a dependancy, and depclean allows you to
remove any packages not explicitly installed which aren't depended on by
anything. Howeve,r also see how many problems they've had with it; it
can be a very easy way to make a system unbootable.

It does, however, have a nugget of a good idea embedded in it (which Jef
touched on): making it easier for administrators to manage "leaf node"
packages. Some use cases I've bumped into:

- Administrator removes a package, and wants to know what other packages
depended on it (and only it), so they can see good candidates for
removal.

- Administrator wants to browse through packages which nothing depends
upon, for auditing for removal.

I'm sure there's a few more. "rpm -q --leafnodes" perhaps, plus a little
more verbosity from "yum uninstall" detailing packages this was the sole
dependancy for?

-- 
Edward S. Marshall <esm at logic.net>
http://esm.logic.net/
Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.