Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 191853
too easy to wipe out GNOME
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:11:32 EST
Description of problem: There is little sanity checking on RPM operations. Rightly or not, GNOME has a tremendous dependency tree that includes all sorts of insignificant bits of cruft. A co-worker of mine removed a package, probably via the graphical tool. Nothing warned him that he had just wiped out every last scrap of GNOME. Poof, and it was all gone. After a long and fruitless search for the package name needed to restore GNOME, he gave up and reinstalled the OS. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Probably 100%, but not really known. Steps to Reproduce: 1. remove some minor useless thing that GNOME indirectly "needs" 2. 3. Actual results: GNOME is gone, without a trace and without warning. Expected results: If and only if the user is about to remove something major: "WARNING: you about to remove 666 packages, including some that are via 6th-level dependancy chains. This includes one or more critical or very large packages including: gnome ..." In text mode: make the user type "I am certain." exactly. In the GUI: seriously, use buttons labeled "shoot foot" and "do not shoot foot". An "OK" is not good enough because people reflexively click it to dismiss the many unimportant dialogs. Additional info:
There is no single command that is easily mistyped from the CLI that will remove all of GNOME. Presumably, all GNOME packages were removed from some other tool, and your bug is with that tool, not rpm. For tools that use rpmlib, rpm provides mechanism only, and there are no API's that ask Are you really really really realluy sure that you want to do ....? from within rpmlib. Nor should there be ...