Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-factory (297 mails)

[Martin Schlander <suse@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Mandag 15 januar 2007 11:50 skrev Klaus Kaempf:
> Patterns are used for grouping of packages (and patterns). This grouping
> is accomplished by dependencies, either Requires (must) or Recommends
> (should).
>
> Installing a pattern means "honor its dependencies". So removing a package
> required by an installed pattern will break this dependency. YaST, being
> an interactive tool, should give you a warning. rug, being a batch tool,
> will also de-install the pattern in order to maintain sane dependencies
> of installed objects.

This is certainly one of the bigger, if not the biggest, issue with 10.2. 

A couple of examples:

I installed from DVD5, when I wanted to remove RealPlayer I got a lot of 
conflicts with the other non-oss stuff, I eventually found out that I could 
solve the problem by removing the non-oss pattern. To me it makes absolutely 
no sense that RealPlayer should require Java. And I'm thinking maybe the 
costs of patterns outweigh the benefits.

The other day I wanted to mess with zeroconf, so I tried installing 
avahi-msdnresponder-stuff, since the zeroconf-kio-slave said no daemon was 
running I wanted to remove it again and try using the "real" mdnsresponder, 
to see if it worked better. This was impossible however, since all of a 
sudden removing avahi would mean removing kdebase-ksysguard and loads of 
other stuff with absolutely no connection with avahi. Apparently avahi is not 
in any pattern, so it most be some avahi-deps that are tied into something.

I thought it might be libzypp doing some strange resolving, but smart also 
wants to remove 25-30 packages in order to remove avahi. Many of them 
essential stuff.

For now I've just let it be. But I can think of no other solution than a) 
removing all patterns or b) ignoring all the conflicts. Neither is 
particularly satisfying.

I wonder if the patterns could be made to only have effect when being 
installed, but with no (pattern) requirements being honoured when removing 
individual packages - guess it would be tricky.

Or how about a disable-patterns-switch?

I'm also hearing n00bs complaining about dependency conflcts in forums, of 
course their error descriptions aren't very good, but it smells like patterns 
causing problems.

Martin
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxx
For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@xxxxxxxxxxxx