Is yum dependency resolution upside down?

[Klaus Pedersen]

I don't know if it is yum, the package group definitions or the package
dependencies that are wrong - but no matter who is to blame - the result is
definitely not intuitive (or imho correct)...

After being hit by a fatal error in preupgrade, I am now unable to re-run the
upgrade because of low memory[1][2].

To recover memory[3] I have tried to remove some package groups - but the
results are most surprising (and quite useless).

Below are a few examples:

# yum -C groupremove "Dial-up Networking Support"

Is removing "ppp" - and NetworkManager for dependencies:
----------------------
Removing:
 ppp                    i686 2.4.5-12.fc14  @updates                      752 k
Removing for dependencies:
 NetworkManager         i686 1:0.8.4-1.fc14 @updates                      5.5 M
 NetworkManager-gnome   i686 1:0.8.4-1.fc14 @updates                      1.5 M
 NetworkManager-openvpn i686 1:0.8.1-1.fc14 @anaconda-InstallationRepo-201010211
 NetworkManager-vpnc    i686 1:0.8.1-1.fc14 @anaconda-InstallationRepo-201010211
----------------------

NetworkManager is part of (installed) "System Tools" group - not dial-up modem
so why does it even consider to remove it?


# yum -C groupremove "Electronic Lab"

* Is (correctly) removing "drawtiming" and "openocd"
* surprisingly also "eclipse*" and "xorg-x11-fonts*" and "xscreensaver*"
  for dependencies(!!)

eclipse was installed with "Fedora Eclipse" group.


# yum -C groupremove "Text-based Internet"

* Unsurprisingly suggest removing: bittorrent, cadaver, elinks, fetchmail, ...
* But for dependencies: docbook-utils*, evolution-data-server-devel,
  gnome-*-devel, libgnome*-devel, gtk-doc, xulrunner-devel(!)

I wonder how all the gnome development lib dependencies popped up here...


# yum -C groupremove "Java Development"

* Unsurprisingly suggest to remove a lot of java development stuff.
* But quite surprising for dependencies also eclipse* and openoffice.org-base*
  - for example: eclipse-cdt, eclipse-oprofile, eclipse-systemtapgui
    eclipse-linuxprofilingframework, ...

Notice - this is not the "Java" group - in which case the eclipse and ooo-base
stuff would have been fine.


and my favorite:


# yum -C remove wine

========================================================================
Removing:
 wine           i686           1.3.19-1.fc14        @updates         0.0

Transaction Summary
========================================================================
Remove        1 Package(s)

Installed size: 0



I guess I just have to reinstall the system....


BR, Klaus


[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=712750
[2] the system is low on memory because a lot of packages are duplicated in
    fc14 and fc15 versions.
[3] I tried to run "yum history undo last-1" - but that wanted to download and
    reinstall 700MB worth of packages(!)