Bug 467225

How do you differentiate tools such as xmlstarlet which could be both an end-user tool *and* an intermediate dependency?

I'll second the motion: I've often desired a way to cull unnecessary packages
without removing potentially useful stuff that has no hard deps, but which if
removed might cripple other apps and/or reduce their features/capabilities. In
particular, as the OP suggests: how to remove unneeded deps dragged in by
installation of one package, which is then quickly removed, leaving a pile of
"useless" packages in it's wake? Could RPM as it exists possibly sort out "soft
deps" and list packages whose removal would impact the functionality of other
packages, without necessarily crippling them/violating hard dep requirements?

@Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams: That's what we're asking you!!!

Regards,
VJSchiavoni

Sorry Ignacio if i can't talk about "xmlstarlet", but i just don't know what is it :-/

I'll make another example, i hope you were talking about this anyway...
(if i'm not wrong)In Fedora 7, "curl" (one utility to download files...) was in only one package.
In Fedora 9, curl was in two packages called: "curl" and "libcurl".
The first with the manual and the executable file; the second with the libs.
If packages are created in a good way (like curl for F9), it's simple to uninstall "curl" (EndUserApplication:yes) but keeping "libcurl" (EndUserApplication:no) IF other software rely on "libcurl" (because you can check it). 
If you remove all the software that have dependencies on "libcurl": because libcurl is set with "EndUserApplication:no" you can uninstall libcurl too (as it's not necessary anymore)!
What if some software is rely on "curl"--the end user application?
Simple, as that software has a dependency-links to "curl", then you cannot remove "curl" nor "libcurl" without removing also the others applications (as you know, right now; yum will remove any software that depends on all the packages you are going to remove)

bye!

Sorry, nevermind: yum-remove-with-leaves is the plugin we're looking for, so it seems to already exist.

VJS

This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 10 development cycle.
Changing version to '10'.

More information and reason for this action is here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping

Ok. After a long test with "yum-remove-with-leaves", i feel free to say that (unlucky) "yum-remove-with-leaves" is more similar to a virus than to what i was talking about as that yum plugin wants to destroy your system at each update.

bye!!!

Re: comment #1

You differentiate by looking at dynamic usage statistics such as st->st_atime
for all files in a package to determine whether any file within a package has been
recently used. Yes noatime on a mount point forces other metrics than st->st_atime
to be used instead. Any metric related to whether a file within a package has
been recently used will work if st->st_atime updating is disabled.

What works rather poorly is to attempt to remove package leaf nodes in the dependency
graph blindly. Better metrics, even installtime, are better hints to "unused" than
the fact that a package is a leaf node because there are often missing, implicit,
dependencies because of poor packaging, that cause packages to appear to be
leaf nodes when they are not.

Hello Bug Zapper,

Since this is a feature request (explicitly named) and according to http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping
This bug report should not have been rebased from rawhide to F10.

Instead the bug may have been setup wrong and should be changed to enhancement instead of bug ...

Thanks !

nobody cares!!
so i'll close it!

bye!
Bee!!! -- http://honeybeenet.altervista.org/beesu/