On Tue, 2016-12-06 at 02:23 -0500, Felix Miata wrote:

Several of these occur on what seems like nearly every zypper up or dup that  occurs on an infrequent basis. The current up process I'm looking at was last  performed 30 days ago, and consists of removal of Konsole and Marble. Firefox  (or is it Mozilla Firefox, or is it MozillaFirefox) is another I see frequently.

Why is it that "application" names that match program names representing  installed rpms even exist in the first place, much less repeatedly get installed  and removed?

Applications is what a user cares for - packages is a technical mean of distribution. Traditionally, we only supported packages and that's what rpm, with zypp around it, handles. With the raise of software centers, the package centric approach is still 'nice' from a technical PoV, but it's terribly bad to be represented to a user. There you care for 'applications'. Out of this need, a new metadata set, called AppStream was born. Now, AppStream is 'just' a set of XML files, in the right format. Currently, only the openSUSE distribution itself provides guaranteed valid AppStream metadata - all other repos have 'some code in place to produce something, but more often than not that fails to produce valid AppStream data' Zypper combines the repository metadata with the published AppStream metadata out of a repository. Once you have a package installe, it also leaves information about which 'Application' it contains (if any. Not every package registers an application). If you now perform an update of a package (specifically outside of the openSUSE distro, from any 3rd party repo), zypp only has info about the 'Package' you update. But the repo data does not provide the info that this package would also contain the application. The 'old' package you had contained the application. Logical consequence: it 'seems' to zypp as the new package no longer provides the application and thus tells you the application will be removed. This is currently work in progress - and once OBS is able to produce valid and reliable AppStream metadata, this is very likely just to solve all those issues. If this is for cases inside the distribution, then there are often packaging bugs. Last but not least: I'm pretty sure the Update repo also does not have valid AppStream - so anything published there will show the same behavior of 'applications being removed' Cheers, Dominique