[Mageia-dev] Orphans - those poor orphans . . .

Fri Jan 6 16:58:03 CET 2012

Am 06.01.2012 16:48, schrieb Guillaume Rousse:
+> Le 06/01/2012 16:13, Wolfgang Bornath a écrit :
+>> Ah, I see your reasoning, of course, if the packager forgot to name
+>> the requires then urpmi declares them as orphans. But then, to be
+>> safe, you have to forget about auto-orphans altogether because you can
+>> not be sure that all packagers did their homework.
+> Then you have to forget about using packages because you're not sure
+> packagers did their work correctly.
+>
+> So far, still no one proved than 'orphan' status was wrong regarding urpmi
+> definition of what is an orphan package, rather than regarding their own
+> personal expectation.
+>
+Maybe the problem comes from the fact that urpmi's orphan definition
+and the scope/purpose of the auto-orphan function is nowhere
+officially documented AFAIK, and so users think that it magically
+does whatever they imagine that this should do.
+
+I'd like to document it in our wiki, so at least we can point those
+people to some documentation and they understand how this is
+supposed to work.
+
+So what would you like to add to such documentation, currently i'd
+start with tv's explanation:
+
+    orphan packages are packages that were never directly requested/installed;
+    they're packages that got installed because they were requested or suggested
+    by other packages that were explicitely choosed.
+    Then if you remove the package you explicitely choose, urpmi sees that the
+    packages that were requested by this one are no more required by anything
+    and since you never explicitely requested them, it offer to remove them.
+
+    You can explicitely request them by running "urpmi <package>" and it'll never
+    be in the orphan list anymore after.
+
+
+Also mentioning /var/lib/rpm/installed-through-deps.list and the
+description of it from urpmi.files manpage.
+
+
+BTW: why is apropos telling me there's nothing appropriate for urpm/urpmi?
+Is that a bug?
+
+