Dependency loops considered harmful?

[Michael Schwendt]

On Wed, 03 Sep 2008 19:39:38 +0200, Hans de Goede wrote:

> Actually its more about the removal scenario, lets say someone does:
> df
> yum install vegastrike    (drags in vegastrike-data)
> df                        (who thats big)
> <play vegastrike>         (hey that games sucks and eats up my HD-space)
> yum remove vegastrike
> df                        (WTF, why am I still missing 0.4 Gigs of HD-space ??)

And what about the many libraries, sound fonts and stuff the game
might have pulled in? "yum remove vegastrike" wouldn't remove them
either.

So, the dependency loop is just to work around yum remove's
non-intuitiveness. That yum remove is not the reverse of yum install
is a complaint in many comments about Fedora.

If we had strict ("tight") dependencies down to the core groups of
packages, we could fix yum remove. It would try to remove as many pkgs
as possible, at least it would try to remove direct requirements of
"vegastrike" unless they would break anything else.