Obsolete RPMs

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Wednesday 29 June 2011 10:57:31 Dave Cross wrote:
> On 28 June 2011 17:40, Kam Leo <kam.leo at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 9:06 AM, Dave Cross <davorg at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> But it strikes me that there will now be a number of obsolete RPMs
> >> hanging around on my system. These will be the RPMs relating to
> >> features used in GNOME 2 but not in GNOME 3. I'm thinking of things
> >> like compiz and all of the applets. Is there any reason why I
> >> shouldn't just remove all of these RPMs? Are there any more that I can
> >> remove safely?
> > 
> > You can use package-cleanup; however, read the man page before using
> > it. Beware that --orphans flags locally installed packages as well as
> > those no longer found in your enabled repositories.
> 
> Thanks. I know about package-cleanup but that doesn't really address
> what I was talking about.  I think i was either unclear r confused
> (possibly both).
> 
> I think there are potentially RPMs that are still available from the
> repos which are no longer required under GNOME 3. I see that the GNOME
> applet RPMs were all removed by the upgrade, but I still have a number
> compiz RPMs which (if I understand correctly) are no longer used under
> GNOME 3. They've been updated to F15 versions, but I don't think I
> need them any more.

If you do a

  package-cleanup --leaves --all

you will get a list of all packages that are not dependencies of anything 
else. Go through the list and for each package decide whether you want to use 
it or not. If not, feel free to yum remove it. Otherwise, keep it.

Once you have removed all packages from the list that you don't need, do the 
above command again, since (after several yum remove-s) new leaf packages may 
have been created. Rinse and repeat until you are satisfied with what you want 
to have installed on your system.

No dependencies will be broken in the process.

This cannot be automated since the machine cannot know which package you do or 
do not want installed.

HTH, :-)
Marko