further package removals/potential package removals

[Jeff Johnson]

Jamie Zawinski wrote:

>Jeff Spaleta wrote:
>  
>
>>On a tangent to this...  whats the easiest way to get a feel of which
>>packages I'm not using on my fedora install?  Is there anytihng more
>>clever than doing an exhaustive check of atimes on all the files owned
>>by rpm packages and comparing that to the package install time?
>>    
>>
>
>After I do a fresh install, I usually just go through the "rpm -qa"
>list and start trying "rpm -e" on stuff that I believe I don't use,
>and see when I get a dependency on something that I know I *do* use.
>  
>

Try "rpm -qa --last", the older packages are often unused.

>Which is distressingly often.  There is just an amazing amount of
>dependency clutter in there.
>  
>

"dependency clutter" presumes that dependencies are arbitrarily designed to
decrease the quality of your life.

That is not the case.

Instead ...

>For example: I don't use Windows, ever.  This means I don't use Samba.
>But I can't uninstall it, because Nautilus depends on it.  Now, I don't
>use Nautilus either, but I can't just uninstall *that*, because
>control-center depends on it, which I *do* use.
>  
>

... nautilus "needs" samba much likes it needs just about every other 
bleeping library
in FC4. Why? Because users want "features", and features requires 
implementations,
usually in libraries, which use sonames, which are copied into package 
dependencies.

This situation is unlikely to change as long as users want "features", duh.

However, dependencies are the least of your problems. As long as 
nautilus links
libraries that link libraries that link libraraies that need samba, then 
one will not
be able to achieve joy of a full "featured" nautilus that executes 
unless the
necessary libraries are, indeed, present and installed.

Blaming dependencies form libraries is like blaming Kerry for Iraq.

>Likewise, I don't own a printer and haven't in years, but I often find
>myself unable to delete the zillions of printer drivers without also
>deleting Ghostscript and half of Gnome or something.
>  
>

So change how ghostscript is packaged, splitting out each individual printer
driver into a separate package, leaving a pristine ghostscript that 
floats your boat.

>If space is tight, the first thing I do is nuke everything except en_US
>under /usr/share/locale/ and /usr/lib/locale/ -- since I don't happen to
>speak 113 different languages, that's more than 320MB of pure waste.
>  
>

If space is tight, then you're cheap ;-) Seriously, diska *are* cheap. 
And there
is already a mechanism to install only requested locales, feel free to 
configure
to limit locales to *only* en_US if your boat is sinking because of locale
baggage.

>Blowing away /usr/share/doc/ is also helpful; it's huge, and every file
>in there is Googlable.
>
>  
>

Try --excludedocs, been in rpm for years. Seriously, /usr/share/doc 
ain't the problem,
look around a bit on your file system with "du -s".

73 de Jeff