Fedora 11 wireless-tools yum erase?

Matthew Woehlke mw_triad at users.sourceforge.net
Wed Jun 24 21:46:50 UTC 2009


TK009 wrote:
> [...] it bothers me because I don't want packages on my machine I
> don't need. As it is my machine that is reason enough. Size is
> irrelevant.

Hate to say it, but... if this is the case, you want (need) Gentoo. 
Fedora (and most pre-packaged distros) is going to pull dependencies for 
optional features.

The alternative is either:
- build multiple packages for each combination of optional features
- check for everything at runtime

Both have significant drawbacks. The latter has the further disadvantage 
(a problem we /already/ have, I'll add) that it makes it hard to 
discover that something can be enhanced by addition of some optional 
package.

At best, you can do something in a small number of significant cases. I 
tend to think deps should be split when something especially useful 
(e.g. NetworkManager) is hanging onto an entire chain of potentially 
useless functionality (yes, like wireless... or bluetooth) that can 
amount to a large number of packages and/or used space. As another 
example, kcalc requiring foomatic is a particular pet peeve of mine. 
(But wpa_supplicant is probably not worth it, both because of size, and 
because - as elsewhere noted - it might be needed on wired. Printing 
support is another matter... at least on size it is around 100 MB.)

But in general, if you want a super-lean system, you need to roll your 
own packages with the exact dependency set you want.

-- 
Matthew
Please do not quote my e-mail address unobfuscated in message bodies.
-- 
Do you know where your towel is?




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