Removing package and its dependencies

[Jeff Vian]

On Tue, 2006-08-01 at 14:01 +0100, Paul Smith wrote:
> On 8/1/06, Jeff Vian <jvian10 at charter.net> wrote:
> > > > > Thanks, Waqas. Ideally, yum should not act as you describe, as not
> > > > > always the same package is necessary for two other different packages.
> > > > > I was trying to remove mediawiki and all the packages that were
> > > > > installed when mediawiki was installed. Meanwhile, I found that
> > > > > synaptic has got the "complete removal" feature that seems to
> > > > > correspond to what I was looking for. Thus, I ask: if synaptic is apt
> > > > > to perform a complete removal (the package itself and the other
> > > > > packages required by it), why is not yum also able to do so?
> > > >
> > > > A similar feature is provided in yum-utils
> > > >
> > > > # yum install yum-utils
> > > > # package-cleanup --leaves. Take a look at the other options and
> > > > commands too. This isnt exposed in any graphical program that uses yum
> > > > that I know of though.
> > >
> > > Thanks, Rahul.
> > >
> > > # package-cleanup --leaves
> > >
> > > only gives a list of packages, and, therefore, it seems that I have to
> > > use 'yum remove' to remove them. Is there some way of automatically
> > > feeding that list into the 'yum remove' command?
> > >
> > did you try man on package-cleanup?
> >
> > It tells me:
> > DESCRIPTION
> >        package-cleanup  is  a  program  for  cleaning up the
> > locally-installed RPMs.
> 
> Sure, I did, but
> 
> package-cleanup --leaves mediawiki
> 
> did not remove mediawiki.
> 
if you want that list fed to 'yum remove' this would work

  yum remove `package-cleanup --leaves mediawiki`

I had to look at the output and test it to be sure.

However, look carefully at the list it proposes.  When I tried it I did
not get _only_ the packages that were required for my test package, but
also got a full list of all the leaves in the package tree -- including
yum and a lot of libraries.  It seems the output of the --leaves option
is not limited to the branch with the package you specify.

Needless to say I did not do the uninstall.


> Paul
>