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

[Thierry Vignaud]

On 6 January 2012 15:53, LinuxBSDos.com <finid at linuxbsdos.com> wrote:
>> This is a well known issue.
>> To clear out the list you need a deep knowledge of the system to
>> determine which packages are really not needed anymore.
>>
>> Lately  this --auto-orphans line shreddered my whole system on a fresh
>> install after the first update, several system services could not
>> start at next reboot, applications did not run, etc. One of the very
>> few times I had to re-install because of a bug. Call me newbie or
>> pussy but until this is not a secure function I will never touch it
>> again.
>
> Btw, this problem is not unique to Mageia. After I hosed a Debian
> installation by running apt with auto-orphans, I vowed never to mess with
> orphans again.
>
> The system has to be intelligent enough to know what is or is not an orphan.

It is.
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.