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

[Wolfgang Bornath]

2012/1/6 Guillaume Rousse <guillomovitch at gmail.com>:
> 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.

I'd argue like that as well if we were in court. But it's not the
same: if a packager misses something and the installation does not
work, so what? I can use another package or distribution. But if he
causes urpmi to regard a needed package as orphan and lets me remove
it the system can break, now that is a problem.

> 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.

Yes, because the user does not care about any such definitions when he
reads on the console or in rpmdrake "These packages are orphans now,
you can safely remove them". I'd suggest to change this sentence ASAP
into "If you are sure that it will not break anything you can remove
them now". This would be a better advice for the user than "you can
safely remove".

-- 
wobo