RC5: Dependencies everywhere!

[Robert L Cochran]

Rodolfo J. Paiz wrote:

>On Sat, 2004-10-30 at 20:12 -0600, Rodolfo J. Paiz wrote:
>  
>
>>2. Why does rhpl require the synaptics driver? [...]
>>    
>>
>
>Follow-up to my own post here... after some work, I can confirm that I
>cannot remove cups, cups-libs, freetype, fontconfig, xorg*, and a whole
>bunch of other stuff because xorg* is required by synaptics.
>
>Synaptics in turn cannot be deleted since it is required by rhpl, and
>that cannot be removed since it is required by up2date. So if I want to
>keep up2date, I'm stuck with between 30-40MB of stuff just because rhpl
>requires the synaptics package.
>
>And it just seems downright foolish that CUPS, Xorg packages, and a
>bunch of other stuff ends up being installed on the system due to a
>touchpad I don't even have. Given that surely a low percentage of
>computers on Earth have a Synaptics touch pad, and that this package has
>never before existed, isn't this dependency SOMEHOW modifiable?
>
>Why does rhpl depend on synaptics? What can be done to remove that link?
>
>Thanks!
>
>  
>
I know the frustration and the feeling! Some months ago I tried to 
uninstall a small number of web server-related components that came with 
Fedora Core 2 and it was heck because of a seemingly endless chain of 
package dependencies. All I wanted to do was to get rid of a small set 
of packages.  I resorted to rebuilding at least one package where I 
removed the dependency from it, then installed it as an upgrade. That in 
turn let me rpm -e a bunch of packages. Not pretty, but it gave me what 
I wanted. With some packages a little more thought needs to go into 
deciding what the dependencies really ought to be.

Bob