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

[andre999]

Sander Lepik a écrit :
> 07.01.2012 01:09, Johnny A. Solbu kirjutas:
>> On Friday 06 January 2012 18:54, Balcaen John wrote:
>>> I guess when you did encounter that you just remove task-kde from 
>>> your system
>> I did not. I should have been more clearly with my example. :-)=
>> The packages in my example where all console program, that I 
>> installed and removed using urpm[ie]. So I explicitly removed only 
>> the one program I just installed. And it did not install any other 
>> packages, as a result of dependencies.
>>
>> And this is my point. We uninstall a specific program, not a 
>> meta/task package, which result in some packages beeing marked as 
>> orphaned, when they are infact Not orphaned.
> Give us command line example. Install something and remove it and then 
> show me what got orphaned if it wasn't orphan before. What you claim 
> here doesn't sound right as i haven't seen it myself.
>
> -- 
> Sander

It is not exactly the same thing, but in more than one occasion when I 
installed packages with similar functions at the same time, to compare 
them, say A, B, and C, and later uninstalled B and C, I have found A to 
be declared an orphan.  Only to find that it had been required by one of 
the others.
(I often prefer command-line packages.  It is simple to add them to the 
menu if I want.  And I have often enough made such comparisons.  To be 
fair, I haven't done much of that since installing Mageia, when it first 
became available.)

Really though, we should consider how people work with installing software.

The auto-orphans option and how it currently works is based on the 
assumption that if package A is installed as a requirement of package B, 
that on uninstalling B, one will want to uninstall A.  That to me is a 
false premise.
It is likely to be the case, but not necessarily.
Generally users will use the graphic installer (rpmdrake), as it is more 
convenient.  When the question of orphans is presented, if it is 
presented, one should be presented with the same options that are 
presented on installation with required packages.  That is, to be able 
to query the description ("more info") of the associated packages, and 
thus readily make an informed decision of what to remove.
As well, the message should be that the orphaned packages "may" be no 
longer useful, instead of saying that they can be safely removed.
Sure, in terms of not being strictly required by other packages, they 
can be safely removed, but if I had always followed the auto-orphan 
advice, I would have uninstalled gnome on more than one occasion.  
(Which is my usual desktop environment.)

What is more important is what is needed for the user to be able to use 
their computer as they wish, with the packages providing the functions 
they wish.  In that sense, auto-orphans does indeed break systems.

My 2 cents :)

-- 
André