Uninstalling packages should remove its dependencies

"[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.linux.rpm.yum
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Hello, I have a problem when uninstalling packages.
For example, I run "yum install system-config-httpd". Along with it,
two dependencies are also installed: alchemist and libxslt-python.
But later, when I run "yum remove system-config-httpd", it says
nothing about alchemist and libxslt-python. They remain installed,
to no use. After each similar install-and-remove, more and more
disk space is getting wasted. And for a typical user/sysadmin,
it would be impossible to track these orphans. The only way
would be to maintain a list of which packages was installed as
dependencies. But shouldn't that be done automatically by
yum instead? It suggest it could work like this:

When system-config-httpd and its dependencies are installed,
yum stores reference links for alchemist and libxslt-python
respectively towards system-config-httpd. Later when
system-config-httpd is removed, yum detects that it is linked to
by alchemist and libxslt-python. If either alchemist or
libxslt-python has additional reference links to other packages
than system-config-httpd, it will remain installed. Otherwise,
it will be removed along with system-config-httpd.

Any package that was installed explicitly, i.e. not as an
automatic dependency, should never be assigned reference links.
So if you first installed alchemist manually, then installed
system-config-httpd, alchemist would not be removed when
system-config-httpd is removed.
Is there any feature of yum that can do this "reverse" depsolving
when you uninstall a package?
If not, what do you think about adding it?
Viktor



       
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