Fedora Account System
Red Hat Associate
Red Hat Customer
Description of problem: As discussed on IRC, PackageKit currently does not support marking unused dependencies as available for removal after uninstalling a package on Fedora. Because of this, "dnf autoremove" does not find them and there is no easy way to uninstall them, leaving end-user with a system full of unnecessary, old packages. I think that this is really not a good approach and should be fixed. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Use GNOME Software or pkcon to install any package that requires new dependencies to be installed. 2. Uninstall the newly installed package. 3. Run "dnf autoremove". Actual results: dnf autoremove does not find the unused dependencies. Expected results: dnf autoremove finds and removes the unused dependencies. Additional info: https://github.com/hughsie/PackageKit/issues/201
This is something that drives users away from Fedora. I don't know how many current users are really using GNOME Software and PackageKit for regular updates. I uninstalled those two on my workstation machine, because of the issues like this one. I'm using dnf and flatpak directly instead. However, I'm trying to use this on my Silverblue machine and even without packagekit it still has plenty of issues. For regular user (I'm not talking here about power users, but normal people that aren't skilled in IT) is GUI for software installations and updates a must and if it's buggy they will rather go somewhere else. GNOME Software is the default GUI for installation/upgrading on Fedora and it doesn't throws good light on Fedora if there is plenty of issues in this app. I know there is plenty of other things in Fedora that must be polished before release. And I'm not afraid to say that most of them are really polished right now (F29 is really working like a charm), but GNOME Software and PackageKit are base applications in Fedora and a must for regular users. So we have two options here: 1) Test these more thoroughly or 2) Switch to/create new GUI for software installations/updates TLDR: This should be fixed ASAP.
This is even worse since Fedora 29. Uninstalling a package previously installed by PackageKit/GNOME Software using dnf does not uninstall any dependencies anymore as well, see: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1733274
Still not supported on F34/Rawhide.