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

Sat Jan 7 08:18:14 CET 2012

> 2012/1/6 Guillaume Rousse <guillomovitch at gmail.com>:
+>> Le 06/01/2012 16:13, Wolfgang Bornath a Ã©crit :
+>>
+>>> 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.
+>
+> I'd argue like that as well if we were in court. But it's not the
+> same: if a packager misses something and the installation does not
+> work, so what? I can use another package or distribution. But if he
+> causes urpmi to regard a needed package as orphan and lets me remove
+> it the system can break, now that is a problem.
+>
+>> 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.
+>
+> Yes, because the user does not care about any such definitions when he
+> reads on the console or in rpmdrake "These packages are orphans now,
+> you can safely remove them". I'd suggest to change this sentence ASAP
+> into "If you are sure that it will not break anything you can remove
+> them now". This would be a better advice for the user than "you can
+> safely remove".
+>
+
+True that the user does not and should not care about definitions of an
+orphan, but also, the user should not be put in a situation where he/she
+will have to go hunting for what could or could not break anything.
+
+--
+finid
+
+
+