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

Florian Hubold doktor5000 at arcor.de
Fri Jan 6 16:58:03 CET 2012


Am 06.01.2012 16:48, schrieb Guillaume Rousse:
> Le 06/01/2012 16:13, Wolfgang Bornath a écrit :
>> 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.
>
> 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.
>
Maybe the problem comes from the fact that urpmi's orphan definition
and the scope/purpose of the auto-orphan function is nowhere
officially documented AFAIK, and so users think that it magically
does whatever they imagine that this should do.

I'd like to document it in our wiki, so at least we can point those
people to some documentation and they understand how this is
supposed to work.

So what would you like to add to such documentation, currently i'd
start with tv's explanation:

    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.


Also mentioning /var/lib/rpm/installed-through-deps.list and the
description of it from urpmi.files manpage.


BTW: why is apropos telling me there's nothing appropriate for urpm/urpmi?
Is that a bug?



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