[NEW IDEA] Automatic removal of dependencies

[Pádraig Brady]

Edward S. Marshall wrote:

>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.
>  
>
You can do that quite simply with rpm and dpkg currently.
See: http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/whatrequires

Pádraig.