Fedora 11 wireless-tools yum erase?

[Adam Williamson]

On Sun, 2009-06-21 at 11:40 -0400, TK009 wrote:
> As to the bug itself, I can not and will not speak for why it bothers
> the OP. To answer your question though, it bothers me because I don't
> want packages on my machine I don't need. As it is my machine that is
> reason enough. Size is irrelevant.

It's important to note that this is not a reasonable expectation.

Think about what it means when you use a distribution which implements
dependencies, and a dependency-resolving package manager like yum. What
you are saying is 'I would like to trade the bit-by-bit control of what
is installed on my computer for the convenience of letting someone else
worry about it'. Simply by the act of using Fedora you essentially
affirm that you actually _don't_ want to have permanent bit-by-bit
control of this nature.

If you really want that, you should either run Slackware, LFS, or run
Fedora but install everything from source or with rpm -Uvh (--nodeps
when appropriate), and figure out dependencies yourself.

As long as you cede the control of the decision of what software really
'requires' other software to your distribution, you should recognize
that you can't then use "I should have that control" as an argument when
talking about distribution dependencies. It's fine to suggest that
such-and-such a dependency shouldn't really be there, but it's not fine
to justify this by saying "I should have control over what gets
installed", because the whole point of dependencies is to save you the
pain of worrying about that.

Remember that ultimately Fedora _does_ grant you access to that level of
control, should you choose to use it: rpm -e --nodeps is available and
does what it says on the tin. The trade-off is you get the
responsibility along with the power. :)
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net