[Mageia-discuss] Package management system

[Richard]

On Wednesday 29 September 2010 07:23:28 Renaud MICHEL wrote:
> On mercredi 29 septembre 2010 at 01:47, Richard wrote :
> > Does this mean that I can find the KDE packages which "depend" on Pulse
> > and  re-package them such that Pulse is only "recommended"?
>
> Here (2010.1 x86_64) KDE does not have a dependency on pulse audio.
> Gnome has, because pulseaudio (actually the package is pulseaudio-esound-
> compat) provides esound, which is required by gnome.
>
Sorry I was so careless in my comment. I was working from memory and those 
memories are heavily dosed with frustration and annoyance. What I should have 
done is give a concrete example. When I select lib64pulseaudio0 for removal, 
rpmdrake lists 526 dependencies (direct and, presumably, indirect) which must 
also be removed. 

Only 39 of these have the string "kde" in the package name, but some of these 
are quite central to the operation of KDE;

kdepasswd-4.4.3
kdenetwork4-core-4.4.3
kdemultimedia4-core-4.4.3
kdegraphics4-core-4.4.3
kdegames4-core-4.4.3
kdeutils4-core-4.4.3
kdelibs4-core-4.4.3

...for example.

Many many more are kde applications. This is 2010.1 x86_64
>
> Anyway, you can simply disable pulseaudio from the control center, so it is
> not a problem to have the package still lying around.

That is, of course, the first thing I do when installing new systems. I don't 
think that I can agree that it is not a problem for me to have all of this 
Pulse stuff lying around. I find it quite tricky enough to get all required 
applications working as I want them without having to worry about whether 
something somewhere thinks it can still use Pulse because the support files 
are still present.

Worse still are the applications which presume Pulse must be present and are 
configured with that incorrect default assumption, but that's another gripe 
for another place.

Richard