Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 219626
xorg-x11-drivers: excessive package requirements
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:11:51 EST
Description of problem: package xorg-x11-drivers depends on *every* driver package like xorg-x11-drv-*(sixty of them on my machine!) Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 7.1.3 How reproducible: always Steps to Reproduce: 1. list of requires: rpm -qR xorg-x11-drivers 2. try to remove useless driver: rpm --test -e xorg-x11-drv-spaceorb Actual results: unable to remove useless drivers, waste of disk space, waste of repo bandwidth every time an update is made Expected results: should be able to remove most of the drivers except the minimum required Additional info: Use the 'provides' tag in the driver packages to make them provide some virtual package like 'Xdriver' and changing xorg-x11-drivers to require that virtual package.
There are two things here: a) decision to distribute many drivers per default b) how to remove unecessary drivers when user wants to save space or for any other reason Concerning a), Red Hat decided to install as many drivers as possible, probably because disk space is abundant these days and we expect users to prefer that when they put a new piece of hardware to the computer, it just works(TM). See other OS providers who does the same. What distinguishes as from them is that actually you can remove unwanted drivers from your computer ;-). Concerning b) -- this is really not our bug, but incorrect understanding of how RPM dependencies work. You have to remove xorg-x11-drivers package first and then you can remove any particular driver packages you want. Try: # rpm -e --test xorg-x11-drivers xorg-x11-drv-spaceorb So for now I am closing this bug as NOTABUG.
Understood. It all seems to take up a total of 5 Mib; I have many single ogg files that are almost that big. Disk space is not an issue. I do feel bad about wasted bandwidth of the many kind mirrors of fedora updates. I believe that acting as if bandwidth is an infinitely available resource is wrong. How about all the Fedora installations worldwide join up into a semi-permanent 'cloud' of BitTorrent peers to distribute updates? The benefits are: 1) shared cost of distribution (most important) and 2) speed. I think that your solution, while it works, allows one to completely nuke a system. Making xorg-x11-drivers required and a minimal N of the drivers required like ...-vesa ...-vga ...-void ...-dummy plus at least one of the actual chip drivers would make for a robust system. But you are right, it works for now, it does not impose any unbearable onus.