RPM roadmapping

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 7/27/07, Panu Matilainen <pmatilai at redhat.com> wrote:
> The more specific you can be, the better - "make it not suck" isn't
> productive. Of course there's no way everything can be done, we want the
> next major release out before end of the decade... Also this is not a
> voting where most votes guarantee implementation, but consider it your
> chance to be heard. I'm listening... :)

If I had any ability to hack on rpm.....
Is there a way to make the rpmdb smart enough to make auto-removal of
package dependencies happen when all packages using that dep were
explicitly installed are no longer on the system.

Naively, I would think that you could mark individual packages as
explicitly installed or not in the rpmdb.  So tools which interact
with the db could set that flag accordingly and such a demarcation
could be queried or used in transactions.

Examples yum install ekiga  would flag ekiga but any deps pulled into
the transaction would not get flagged as explicit.  yum install
libsexy would flag libsexy as explicit.  The explicit mark in the db
would be used to protect marked packages from leaf vacuuming, so that
we can make common use of leaf vacuuming.

-jef"make it not not not suck!"spaleta