Yumex cleaned my system..... How do I contact yum-team?

[Craig White]

On Tue, 2008-07-01 at 21:36 +0200, DB wrote:
> g wrote:
> > DB wrote:
> >> My problem comes when I try to remove
> >> "something" (e.g. CUPS) when yumex seems to consider every application
> >
> > i can imagine several reason of wanting to remove a program, cups 
> > among them.
> >
> > would yours be that you do not print with mentioned system, or that 
> > you want to
> > print with different program?
> >
> >
> Hi G,
> neither!  I had been trying a) to get my Epson all-in-one to work as per 
> book & b) trying to get a pdf printer installed.
> 
> Neither seemed(!) to be successful, then the next reboot stalled in 
> CUPS, so I thought remove CUPS & reinstall to see if it had got its 
> knickers in a knot .....
> 
> I'd had a similar experience on my first install of F9, when I thought I 
> could remove all the dial-up options (I use either an Ethernet 
> connection or a wireless from my laptop) & yum quite cheerfully took out 
> Network Manager & left me without a connection....
> 
> To my simple brain(!) it would seem the definition of "dependency" is 
> not clean.  I would have thought that a dependency is something which 
> must be present for something to function; whereas a relationship 
> Master-servant would mean that in  something like CUPS-Firefox, FF is 
> the Master & CUPS the servant providing a service.  One should be able 
> to remove either the Master or the Servant without destroying the other, 
> just making sure the connections are tidied up....
----
allow me to give you a non-technical overview of the packaging used on
Linux.

Linux uses compatible libraries throughout their software building which
means that the authors of one package don't have to repeat work that's
already available elsewhere. So one package may 'require' another
package. Typically, they break down the bigger packages into
'libs' (which provide the dependencies), 'devel' which provide the
library code for building software packages that require these 'libs',
and then the package itself (and often, the package itself can be broken
down into things like server/client, etc.)

Yum (yumex and all things yum) is designed to handle all of the
dependencies to make it easy for the user to install software because
when you choose to install something from yum (or one of the yum front
end programs), it solves dependencies and adds packages as needed.

Likewise, when you choose to remove some package, yum (or one of the yum
front end programs) will need to remove all software packages that
depend upon the one you are removing.

But yum assumes that the user understand the ramifications of the
solutions that it offers. It asks you to confirm the
installation/removal before it proceeds and shows you what it's going to
do which you admitted seeing.

Thus yum behaved as intended and while unfortunate that you failed to
comprehend the ramifications of your choices, you do now I suppose.

I also suppose that you can choose to have any definition of what
constitutes dependencies but the packaging system used by Red Hat/Fedora
(like the packaging systems of all other versions of Linux that I am
aware of), all have a consistent method of handling installation/removal
of packages and if you are uncertain, you can always ask the list.

Craig