RPM roadmapping

[Peter Jones]

Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> On 7/27/07, Panu Matilainen <pmatilai at redhat.com> wrote:
>> The more specific you can be, the better - "make it not suck" isn't
>> productive. Of course there's no way everything can be done, we want the
>> next major release out before end of the decade... Also this is not a
>> voting where most votes guarantee implementation, but consider it your
>> chance to be heard. I'm listening... :)
> 
> If I had any ability to hack on rpm.....
> Is there a way to make the rpmdb smart enough to make auto-removal of
> package dependencies happen when all packages using that dep were
> explicitly installed are no longer on the system.
> 
> Naively, I would think that you could mark individual packages as
> explicitly installed or not in the rpmdb.  So tools which interact
> with the db could set that flag accordingly and such a demarcation
> could be queried or used in transactions.

There's a logic problem here -- how do you determine which packages are 
marked which way on a fresh install?  Marking them all as explicit means 
you rarely remove anything.  Marking them all implicit means the first 
time you remove anything it destroys your system.  There's no obvious 
determining factor to use as middle ground, at least to me.

-- 
   Peter