how to determain those no longer required packages

[James Antill]

On Sat, 2009-08-29 at 19:06 -0500, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
> >>>>> "AT" == Axel Thimm <Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net> writes:
> 
> AT> I don't think apt traces whether a packages was a pulled in manually
> AT> or automatically, does it?
> 
> yum does keep track of many things in the yumdb and I think the "reason"
> key is supposed to track this, but for me it seems reason is always
> "user".  I think the intent is to track packages which were installed
> because the user requested them directly separately from packages which
> were pulled in purely because of dependencies.

 Yes, the reason attribute in yumdb is there primarily to start on
"solving" this "problem".
 yumdb hasn't been around an entire release yet, which makes it's data
somewhat problematic (and the testing somewhat limited). Also atm. we
don't carry reason=dep across updates, so if you do "yum update" with a
new version of a package you got as a dep. that would be considered a
user install of the new package. Both of which should explain why almost
nothing has reason=dep¹.
 Atm. I have:

% yumdb search reason dep
Loaded plugins: presto
fipscheck-1.2.0-1a.fc11.x86_64
     reason = dep

...so it does work, at what it does atm.

 Probably the sanest request here is that if you do:

1. yum install blah
2. <try out blah, don't like it>
3. yum remove blah

...you don't get rid of any extra stuff you got with blah, hopefully
"yum history undo" will solve that in a better way by recording what
happened at #1 and undoing it instead of trying to piece together what
might have happened at #1 after the fact.


¹ It's also true that saving 1 cent of disk space isn't at the top of my
list of things to do.

-- 
James Antill <james at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora