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Description of problem: # rpm -qi basesystem | grep -A 5 Description Description : Basesystem defines the components of a basic Red Hat Enterprise Linux system (for example, the package installation order to use during bootstrapping). Basesystem should be in every installation of a system, and it should never be removed. However, "yum remove basesystem" would happily remove the package. Shouldn't basesystem be a protected package be a dependency for setup or filesystem or such? Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): RHEL 7.3
(In reply to Marko Myllynen from comment #0) > However, "yum remove basesystem" would happily remove the package. Shouldn't > basesystem be a protected package be a dependency for setup or filesystem or > such? The basesystem package requires both filesystem and setup, not the other way around. So, if you install basesystem, it will pull basic building blocks of the system. Removing the package is useless. Why would anyone explicitly remove the basesystem package?
For the same reason someone would explicitly remove the systemd package, by accident. Ok, with basesystem the end result is not as severe as with systemd or yum so perhaps we can live with the status quo, I'm ok either way, please feel free to adjust package protections and/or dependencies or close this BZ, I merely happened to notice the basesystem Description and the possibility to uninstall it without any warnings by accident. Thanks,
(In reply to Marko Myllynen from comment #3) > Ok, with basesystem the end result is not as severe as with systemd or yum Exactly. After uninstalling basesystem, the system is still usable. You can (re)boot and/or install basesystem back. No matter how scary the description is. Moreover, I believe that systemd and yum are protected mainly because someone could accidentally remove them based on dependency resolution. It is not the case with basesystem, which only depends on filesystem and setup, which both seem to be already protected.
In my opinion, there is no reason to add the backward dependency. Package basesystem is just relevant before the installation of setup and filesystem package - to magically tweak the order in the transaction. It has no functionality, it has no content, so for me this is not a bug - those who want to have smallest possible system can remove this rpm and get metadata of the package from the system. Anyway, thanks for the report... description is probably too scary...