Question on yum remove - which package ?

David Timms dtimms at iinet.net.au
Sun Jun 17 08:10:48 UTC 2007


Timothy Murphy wrote:
> Steve Searle wrote:
> 
>>> Why does "yum remove foo" try to remove every package
>>> using anything required by foo?
>>> Surely the rational strategy would be to leave anything
>>> required by another package?
>> No.  You asked it to remove foo.  It is rational that it does as you
>> requested.  It would be irrational to:
>>  - not do as you asked, or
>>  - leave behind broken packages because it removed foo
> 
> You misunderstood me (I think)
> As far as I can see, "yum remove foo" removes foo,
> and also everything that foo depends on.
> Then it removes everything that depends on the things already removed.
> And so ad infinitum.
> 
> I would have thought it would be more logical
> to leave anything required by another package.
> 
> Of course anything that requires foo should be removed.
> But that is a different matter.
Are you willing to say which package in particular ?

If not, running:
rpm -q --requires package-yum-wanted-to-remove
will tell you whether yum is doing the right thing according to how the 
application/library has been packaged.

If it is in fact doing the wrong thing, either yourself or someone else 
  will need a repeatable example to make a bug report at 
bugzilla.redhat.com.

Sometimes a package is a meta-package whose job it is to install a heap 
of sub packages.

eg: xorg-x11-drivers installs xorg-x11-drv-* so that all drivers will be 
available should the hardware get changed. This means if you want yum to 
uninstall one of the -drv-* packages, since it is required by -drivers, 
yum then adds -drivers to the remove list which then requires the 
removal of the rest of the -drv-* subpackages, and so on.

The above example can be worked around {although the Fedora developers 
recommend all -drv-* stay installed}, by removing the meta-package first 
{xorg-x11-drivers}, then any individual -drv-* that you are sure you 
wont need.

DaveT.




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