[NEW IDEA] Automatic removal of dependencies

[Panu Matilainen]

On Sat, 22 Apr 2006, Mark Rosenstand wrote:
> It really isn't needed to do it automatically. Debian have a package
> called debfoster (at least they had in 2002), which checks the
> interdependencies of all your packages and for then asks whether you
> want to remove each package that aren't needed by any others, e.g.:
>
> 	Package A keeps these packages installed: G, K, O, R
> 	Do you wish to keep package A? [Y/n]
>
> This has the obvious advantage that you don't have to add yet a piece of
> info to the ever-bloated rpm database.
>
> Gentoo also do it. IIRC it has a command which lists all packages that
> were not installed explicitly and which no other package depends upon
> (which is a nice, logical list), but then they have to ruin an otherwise
> nice feature by automatically removing all said packages after 10
> seconds if not interrupted.

Checking the dependencies is the easy part. What gets less trivial is 
things like this:

[pmatilai at cs181072240 ~]$ rpm -e --test grub
[pmatilai at cs181072240 ~]$

Oops, nothing needs grub, so it can be removed safely, right?

 	- Panu -