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

Sat Jan 7 12:39:07 CET 2012

2012/1/7 Thomas Backlund <tmb at mageia.org>:
+> 07.01.2012 09:18, LinuxBSDos.com skrev:
+>>
+>>
+>> 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.
+>>
+>
+> Well urpme is not at fault. It's doing exactly what it's told.
+>
+> It cant solve packager errors. If a packager has forgot a "Requires",
+> urpmi does not know that.
+>
+> The only things --auto-orphans has to go on is:
+> 1. is the package on the "keep list" such as basesystem -> dont remove.
+> 2. is the package required by some other package -> dont remove.
+> 3. is the package manually installed with urpmi/rpmdrake -> dont remove.
+> 4. is the package the current running kernel -> dont remove.
+>
+>
+> So, if you find your system would be broken (or got broken) by running
+> urpme --auto-orphans (or the same function in rpmdrake), and you want
+> it fixed, file bug reports.
+>
+> And not against urpmi/rpmdrake, but the package that stopped working.
+
+Of course this is one way to find bugs in packages. But what about the
+documented (in German) case where
+ - after fresh installation, reboot (ok) and updates right after
+installation I was presented with a list of more than 100 "orphans".
+ - I ran 'urpme --auto-orphans' and rebooted
+ - several system services (which started successfully after
+installation) refused to start now because of missing files
+
+Of course urpmi was not the culprit because it only checks
+dependencies. But that did matter in that situation. The auto-orphans
+function obviously listed packages which may have no dependencies but
+are needed by the system. That's why I do not complain about urpmi but
+about the whole function. As long as this function is only based on
+package dependencies it is not safe to use it.
+
+-- 
+wobo
+