Do I need avahi?

[Frank]

On 07/28/2013 12:23 PM, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
> On Sun, 28 Jul 2013 16:21:55 +0200
> lee <lee at yun.yagibdah.de> wrote:
>> Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko at gmail.com> writes:
>>> On Sun, 28 Jul 2013 00:58:24 +0200
>>> lee <lee at yun.yagibdah.de> wrote:
>>>> Hmm I disabled it now and will see what happens.  There are 224
>>>> packages depending on the avahi package --- that's insane for
>>>> something that isn't needed.
>>>>
>>>> Why are there so many packages depending on it?
>>> Not on my system (F18/64bit/KDE), there are only 22 of them
>>> depending on avahi, and most of them are just wine-related. If I
>>> didn't need wine or nss-mdns, I could remove it no problem:
>>>
>>> So it's just nss-mdns and wine & friends.
>> It would even remove imagemagick, emacs, vlc, ddd, fvwm, the NVIDIA
>> drivers and a lot of other packages I need.
> Ok, for your convenience, I have uninstalled avahi (temporarily)
> from my machine (remember, this is F18 over here). Here you go:
>
> [root at Yoda ~]# yum list avahi imagemagick emacs vlc ddd fvwm
> Loaded plugins: langpacks, presto
> Installed Packages
> ImageMagick.x86_64     6.7.7.5-3.fc18      @fedora
> ddd.x86_64             3.3.12-11.fc18      @fedora
> emacs.x86_64           1:24.2-19.fc18      @updates
> fvwm.x86_64            2.6.5-3.fc18        @fedora
> vlc.x86_64             2.0.7-1.fc18        @rpmfusion-free-updates
> Available Packages
> ImageMagick.i686       6.7.7.5-3.fc18      fedora
> avahi.i686             0.6.31-6.fc18       fedora
> avahi.x86_64           0.6.31-6.fc18       fedora
> [root at Yoda ~]# uname -a
> Linux Yoda 3.9.11-200.fc18.x86_64 #1 SMP Mon Jul 22 21:04:50 UTC 2013
> x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
>
> As you can see, none of the packages you have mentioned actually
> depends on avahi. Also, I have Intel graphics here so it doesn't make
> much sense to try to install nvidia drivers, but I can bet that they do
> not depend on avahi either.
>
>>> OTOH, if you are running, say, Gnome3 or such, then you should ask
>>> the relevant developers on the relevant mailing list why oh why do
>>> they depend on avahi so much. ;-)
>> I don't --- I could ask on the fvwm mailing list if fvwm needs avahi,
>> and I bet it doesn't.
>>
>> Perhaps yum has messed up the dependencies?
> What appears to be happening in your case is that avahi is needed by
> the Gnome3 desktop environment, maybe even by gdm login manager.
> Removing avahi then probably removes the whole Gnome stuff along,
> leaving the machine without a DE and without a login manager. And then
> it probably turns out that the packages you have mentioned depend on
> the presence of some DE on the system (vlc being a typical example).
> Given that DE would be removed, most of that GUI stuff would go with it.
>
> That's my guess-theory. If you care to provide the actual yum output
> for "yum remove avahi", someone might figure it out more precisely than
> that.
>
> Or it might be that F19 has some weird changes introduced compared to
> F18. But I guess it would be mentioned in the release notes or
> somewhere...


   I'm running 19 without Gnome, but with XFCE, Fluxbox and IceWm installed.
I substituted lightdm for gdm3....

If I tell Yum to remove avahi, it wants to remove 232 
packages...everything including
the kitchen sink :)