RPM roadmapping

seth vidal skvidal at linux.duke.edu
Fri Jul 27 18:10:44 UTC 2007


On Fri, 2007-07-27 at 10:12 -0800, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> 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.

We've kicked around the idea of doing that in a separate db that yum
creates but it:
1. would mean that it ignores stuff not installed by yum
2. it would need to remain persistent across upgrades/etc

so, you're right doing it in rpm or having a way of labeling them in rpm
that way would make it easier.

-sv





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