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

Maarten Vanraes alien at rmail.be
Sat Jan 7 08:48:43 CET 2012


Op vrijdag 06 januari 2012 13:02:26 schreef Thierry Vignaud:
> On 6 January 2012 12:27, Wolfgang Bornath <molch.b at googlemail.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.
> 
> This is just a bogus claim:
> If some apps break after removing orphan packages, they'll break too
> after manually removing such packages, meaning they lack some
> requires...

perhaps, to instill more confidence, we could:

- have only list the leaf orphans; which means of course, you can do it 
multiple times, or maybe --recursive to give them all
- not to list in orphan list packages which don't contain any files: ie, tasks
- mention clearly that if they want to use some package, that they can install 
it
- list separately and sorted the ones with changed access times? as in, they 
have been used since install? (unless partition is mounted noatime, of 
course... /o\

personally, orphans can break packages, but basesystem and basesystem-minimal 
should both not be removed, perhaps we can even put on a warning if those are 
not installed; when running --auto-orphans.

perhaps a combination of these options could instill more confidence... but... 
is it worth it???


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