How does one get a clean installation of Fedora?

[lee]

Sam Varshavchik <mrsam at courier-mta.com> writes:

> lee writes:
>> The avahi-daemon is a good example.  It's not needed and cannot be
>> removed without taking the system down because too many packages depend
>> on it.
>
> I just checked two of my servers, none of them have avahi-daemon
> installed, and both of them are running a full-featured desktop –
> there's over 2000 RPMs installed; so it doesn't look like that package
> is really needed that much.

I wouldn't have a GUI on a server unless it's really needed ... Anyway,
removing avahi would even remove fvwm, metacity, cpus, gtk and some
gnome stuff.  You have a GUI on these servers without gtk?

>> > If what you want requires another package to be installed, you will
>> > have to install it. That's not a "broken dependency". It's a required
>> > dependency.
>>
>> For example, VLC, like many other things, depends on avahi and doesn't
>> need the avahi-daemon.  So you end up not only having things installed
>> you don't need, you also run software you don't need to run.
>
> Hmm. I just tried "yum install vlc", and it was all set to be
> installed, without pulling in the avahi-daemon package.

The package is called avahi.  There is another one called avahi-libs,
and vlc seems to use the libs.

>> > Real broken dependencies are rare, and tend to get fixed easily.
>>
>> Apparently the dependency problems with the NVIDIA drivers were not
>> fixed so easily, if they ever were.
>
> What's an "NVIDIA driver"? I see no such package in Fedora.

If you have an NVIDIA graphics card and want to make use of it, you need
those drivers which you can get from rpmfusion.

> Of course, I'm being facetious. I will not expect that any Fedora
> packager is going to worry, too much, about external RPMs. It's
> Nvidia's obligation to play nice with Fedora, not the other way
> around.

Some people would say that NVIDIA doesn't.

>> For example, what is at-spi-bus-launcher?  It's running for unknown
>> reasons and it doesn't have a manpage.  What is it for?  What does it
>> do?  Do I need it?
>
> rpm -q -f /usr/libexec/at-spi-bus-launcher tells you what it is. It's
> part of Gnome, so it's a fairly core daemon service.


[~] rpm -q -f /usr/libexec/at-spi-bus-launcher
at-spi2-core-2.8.0-1.fc19.x86_64
[~] 


How does that tell me what it is?  Yet yum info tells me, and it's
another package I don't need --- and I can't remove that, either.  116
packages depend on it of which I use only 4 or so.

> This is really code bloat. The dependencies are not broken. There's a
> world of difference between broken dependencies, and code bloat.

That depends on what you consider as "broken".  Since Fedoras package
management apparently doesn't even support suggested packages, it is
broken by design.


-- 
Fedora release 19 (Schrödinger’s Cat)