comps discussion at fudcon and the future

[Matthew Woehlke]

Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
> Matthew Woehlke wrote:
>> This reminds me... on my Asus cleanup project, one of the things I
>> did NOT remove was the xorg-drivers package, for exactly this 
>> reason. This is one case where I want 'yum update' to know about
>> new xorg drivers. But this means I can't remove drivers I don't
>> need, because it will remove the metapackage, which means I won't 
>> automagically find out about new drivers.
> 
> Euhm, I can remove xorg-drivers without any dependencies, but not a 
> xorg-x11-drv-* package. I'm not sure why these other packages depend on 
> xorg-drivers, but that's not how a meta package would be used:

Ok, I'm confused. I agree that's how it works. But that's exactly how it 
is meant to work, from my perspective. xorg-drivers is the metapackage, 
so you cannot remove individual drivers without removing the 
metapackage. (But nothing stops you from removing just the metapackage.)

> yum install @foo would install bar and baz
> 
> yum remove baz would remove baz

Um... no, that's not how it works. foo depends on bar and baz; if you 
remove bar and/or baz without removing foo, foo is broken. (If foo is a 
metapackage, then "broken" doesn't really mean anything, but rpm doesn't 
distinguish between metapackages and regular packages.)

For example, you install kde, which installs qt. By your logic, I could 
now remove qt, but of course kde wouldn't work very well if I did, so 
removing qt also removes anything that depends on it, i.e. kde. 
(Obviously I am simplifying; kde is more fine-grained than one package.)

> yum update @foo would pull in baz again, and maybe newpkg1.

Even *if* rpm knew about metapackages and could do that, I wouldn't want 
baz to be pulled in again. Presumably I removed it because I don't 
need/want it.

> The above example does exactly what you want it to do, just not how you 
> would like it to do so, I presume.

Not quite (as per previous paragraph), but it also doesn't work that way 
currently. If it did, it would be an improvement, although a small one 
if it keeps wanting to reinstall things I removed.

-- 
Matthew
Please do not quote my e-mail address unobfuscated in message bodies.
-- 
"Doggy!" -- Robots from Freefall (http://freefall.purrsia.com)