Is yum dependency resolution upside down?

Matthew Saltzman mjs at clemson.edu
Mon Jun 13 21:18:04 UTC 2011


On Mon, 2011-06-13 at 23:02 +0200, Michael Schwendt wrote: 
> On Mon, 13 Jun 2011 13:44:45 -0700, JZ wrote:
> 
> > On 06/13/2011 01:19 PM, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> > > There you're pretty much off-topic. ;-)
> > 
> > Not quite.  My thinking is that if it comes in with the rest of 
> > Networking, there's a reason, even if I don't know what it is.  For all 
> > I know it might simply be that that's how it was set up back when most 
> > people only had dial-up service and that nobody's bothered to change it 
> > because it doesn't take up enough room to worry about.  And, if so, that 
> > might explain why taking it out takes our the rest of Network Services: 
> > nobody's thought to take a look at it and see if that still makes sense.
> 
> Now you only repeat [albeit with many words] what has been explained
> before. Do I need to repeat that package "ppp" is a dependency of
> NetworkManager and that by removing "ppp" you need to remove
> NetworkManager, too?

That's a "feature" of dependency analysis: NetworkManager expects to be
able to control ppp connections.  In order to do that, it needs ppp. So
if you remove ppp, NetworkManager thinks it is itself broken.  But if
you never intend to use NetworkManager to control ppp connections, it
would seem that you could install NetworkManager without installing ppp.
It would never break if you never ask it to do that.

But there's no easy way to manage these sorts of "conditional
dependencies".  So the simple solution is to just install all the
software that NetworkManager thinks it needs to run under all use cases.
After all, if you never use that feature, the only drawback is a tiny
amount of wasted disk space (and maybe some minor annoyance on the part
of package purists 8^).

> 
> $ repoquery --whatrequires ppp
> ppp-0:2.4.5-17.fc15.x86_64
> NetworkManager-1:0.8.999-2.git20110509.fc15.x86_64
> NetworkManager-1:0.8.9997-2.git20110531.fc15.x86_64
> NetworkManager-pptp-1:0.8.999-1.fc15.x86_64
> bluemodem-0:0.7-6.fc15.x86_64
> kdenetwork-7:4.6.2-2.fc15.x86_64
> kdenetwork-7:4.6.3-1.fc15.x86_64
> ppp-0:2.4.5-17.fc15.x86_64
> pptp-0:1.7.2-12.fc15.x86_64
> rp-pppoe-0:3.10-8.fc15.x86_64
> synce-serial-0:0.11-5.fc15.x86_64
> wvdial-0:1.61-4.fc15.x86_64
> xfce4-modemlights-plugin-0:0.1.3.99-7.fc15.x86_64
> xl2tpd-0:1.2.7-3.fc15.x86_64
> 



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