Package dependency question (on SuSE-10.2)

[Ben Scott]

On 2/19/07, Charles G Montgomery <cgm at physics.utoledo.edu> wrote:
> There is a perl script, available from
> http://scriptopia.agrip.org.uk/
> which will list all packages which are not depended on by other
> packages, if you have a repository like /var/lib/dpkg/status
> available -- I don't know whether rpm sufferers have one

  I don't know about RPM suffers, either.  But I can tell you that
RPM's database lives under /var/lib/rpm/ on most systems.  RPM and
dpkg are pretty different in terms of their database implementation,
though.  Looking at the script you linked to, it's definitely written
around dpkg, so adapting it to RPM would be involved.

  However, it inspired me to Google for "rpm orphan", which quickly found this:

	http://rpmorphan.sourceforge.net/

which looks to be a good solution for distributions not already using
yum (and maybe even those that are).

> The new version of Debian's apt will have the capability, already
> present in aptitude, of remembering which packages were installed
> only as dependencies of something else and removing them when
> they're no longer needed.

  I thought something like that was already present in apt-get and/or
Synaptic?  Specifically, I was under the impression that, when
removing a package, said package's dependencies would be checked, and
anything depended on by just that package would also be selected for
removal.  I know when I issue a command like

	apt-get remove bigthing

more than just the "bigthing" package itself will often be selected
for removal.  Likewise when I unselect something in the Synaptic GUI.

> But that's Debian.  ;-)

  Yah, it is already available, and has been for some time, on
RPM-based systems, with:

	yum remove package

  Although I guess it's not perfect.  I tried

	yum remove clueless-debian-zealots

but I keep encountering traces of that subsystem...

-- Ben