Yum - Removal of dependant packages.

[Paul Howarth]

ded wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 26, 2006 at 11:01:18AM -0500, Christofer C. Bell wrote:
>> On 4/26/06, ded <my.accountnow at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>>> Does Yum not remove dependant packages or did I need to do more than
>>> Yum remove <package>?
> 
>> The work around is to use yum to remove the lowest level dependency
>> that was installed when you installed the main package.  If you do
>> this, yum will remove all software the depends on that package,
>> including the software you were looking to remove (licq).
> 
> Thanks Chris, I'll give that a try this evening.

Bear in mind that there may be multiple lowest-level dependencies.

Supposing you have a dependency hierarchy like this (monospaced font 
needed here):

                AppA                          AppG
                  |                            |
        +---------+-----------+                |
        |                     |                |
      LibB                  LibD               |
        |                     |                |
      LibC        +-----------+-------------+  |
                  |                         |  |
                LibE                        LibF

Supposing you had none of these packages installed to start with.

"yum install AppA" would install AppA, LibB, LibC, LibD, LibE, LibF.

A subsequent "yum install AppG" would just install AppG.

To remove AppA and all the dependencies that came with it, you'd need to 
do "yum remove LibC LibE LibF". But this would also remove AppG, which 
is also dependent on LibF. So you'd really need "yum remove LibC LibE" 
to have the desired effect.

In other words, be careful, watch carefully what yum proposes to do when 
you use "yum remove" and don't even think about using "yum -y remove ..."

Paul.