[ATrpms-users] Packaging standars (Was: lzo on RHEL3)

[Thomas Moschny]

Axel Thimm wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 19, 2007 at 11:19:08AM +0200, Thomas Moschny wrote:
> > One of the design issues is that these lib* packages will stay there and
> > linger around in my system even when they are not needed anymore, until I
> > remove them manually or with the help of yum's package-cleanup or
> > whatever.
> >
> > The reason is that the existing infrastructure (librpm and it's frontends
> > smart/yum/apt) doesn't differentiate between packages that were installed
> > because user explicitly wished so, and those packages that were installed
> > as a dependency. Doing so would require the frontends to maintain their
> > own persistent knowledge about installed packages, as the rpm database
> > doesn't contain that information.
>
> In fact it does, but I haven't delivered a robust implemenation yet.

No, it doesn't. Of course the rpm database contains dependency information, 
but it doesn't record the reason why a package was installed. I might want to 
keep a package installed, even when it is not required (in the rpm sense) 
anymore. (Normally I won't, as I said, but there are exceptions. The library 
might e.g. provide an optional and audio codec.)

> A poor man's implementation is (written down untested)
>
> for package in `rpm -q --whatprovides shared-library-package`; do rpm -e
> $package 2>/dev/null; done

Where does 'shared-library-package' come from?

> Something like this can be placed into cron and remove the packages
> automatically.

This is not really something I'd like to have on a production system.

-- 
Thomas Moschny  <thomas.moschny at gmx.de>
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