Feature changed by: Roberto Mannai (robermann79) Feature #300758, revision 100 Title: Show orphaned packages openSUSE-10.2: Rejected by Thorsten Kukuk (kukuk) reject date: 2006-08-02 11:31:19 reject reason: For SL10.2 we have to get libzypp really stable and fast before we add new features. Priority Requester: Important openSUSE-10.3: Rejected by Stanislav Visnovsky (visnov) reject date: 2007-07-17 17:03:57 reject reason: Postponing. Priority Requester: Important Projectmanager: Desirable openSUSE-11.0: Rejected by Stanislav Visnovsky (visnov) reject date: 2007-11-21 12:16:20 reject reason: Out of scope for 11.0 Priority Requester: Important openSUSE-11.1: Rejected by Stanislav Visnovsky (visnov) reject date: 2008-07-07 13:34:02 reject reason: Postponing, needs underlaying infrastructure to be fixed first. Priority Requester: Important openSUSE-11.2: Rejected by Stanislav Visnovsky (jkupec) reject date: 2009-11-30 14:20:26 reject reason: Marked as done by mistake. The feature is not done. Priority Requester: Important Projectmanager: Important openSUSE-11.3: New Priority Requester: Desirable Requested by: JP Rosevear (jproseve) Description: The package manager should learn to show orphanized packages (packages which are not required by other packages and are not in wanted selections) and allow to deinstall them like the popular debfoster/deborphan tools. A typical use case: user installs an application which pulls in some dependencies to test it, uninstalls the application shortly after or way later but the dependencies stay unused installed on the system. Commandline UI (zypper) only. References: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=166132 Discussion: #1: Jiri Srain (jsrain) (2007-06-05 13:46:00) Schubi, is there any possibility to make solver tell which packages are orphanized? It would be interesting especially if the packages which are marked for deletion were considered as non-installed (eg. if foo- devel is installed but marked for deletion and nothing else requires foo, then foo is orphanized). #2: Stefan Schubert (schubi2) (2007-06-06 11:04:04) (reply to #1) Currently not cause the solver has no information about who (user, package,...) has triggered the installation of a package. If we are storing this information it would be possible for solver to remove these kind of packages too. It is not simple but doable. By the way, we will have to store this kind of information in the future. E.g. we need to save the "keep state by user" in a database in order to regard this state in future solver runs. #3: Jiri Srain (jsrain) (2007-06-06 14:25:07) (reply to #2) Looks like a missunderstanding. Basically every package wihch is not required/recommended/suggested or doesn't enhance anything that is installed and not marked for deletion is IMO considered to be orphanized. If user eg. wants to remove a pattern including all its packages (which are not required by something else), solver providing this kind of information would help a lot (and I don't think that we would need any other information to be stored. #4: Stefan Schubert (schubi2) (2007-06-06 15:33:44) (reply to #3) I do not think so. What does "orphanized" mean ? Let me take your example from comment #1. foo should be deleted too if the user delete foo-devel and foo has been installed due the requirement of foo-devel. BUT the user will kill us if we are deleting foo although the user has installed foo explicit sometime ago in a seperate installation workflow. So this information ( The USER has installed foo) will be currently not saved and is needed here to decide if foo has to be deleted or not. #5: Stefan Schubert (schubi2) (2007-06-06 15:39:47) (reply to #3) Lets take your example concerning the erasing of patterns. That is much more complex. I have already described the problem here: http://en.opensuse.org/Libzypp/Solver#Known_Problems " Proper behaviour of erasing patterns" There are already some bugzilla entries: Bug 274283 - Delete iFolder from YaST makes eDirectory Delete mandatory Bug 238250 - YaST does not upgrade an Add-on Product #6: Jiri Srain (jsrain) (2007-06-08 16:46:32) See also https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=166132 This is another use case for the same solver functionality #8: Federico Lucifredi (flucifredi) (2008-06-12 20:46:17) this should be commandline-only, definitely an advanced-user option. #9: Federico Lucifredi (flucifredi) (2008-06-12 20:47:28) cut from description: See Bug 140346 #10: Duncan Mac-Vicar (dmacvicar) (2008-11-03 11:24:53) As discussed in Prague, this could be done using the package history once we have a reader. #11: Karsten König (remur) (2009-01-19 10:09:49) How about using rpmorphan, I agree with flucifredi about the command line idea... http://rpmorphan.sourceforge.net/ And otherwise you could use their system to find orphanized packages and display them in yast but make clear that deleting -all orphanized packages will also delete the ones explicitly installed... (it only detects wether the package fullfiles any requirement...) #12: Ján Kupec (jkupec) (2009-01-19 14:48:38) (reply to #11) I'm not the solver developer, but i'm pretty sure it's easy (and probably more effective) to find the 'leaf' packages (that's what rpmorphan seems to do) using existing solver (see satsolver package). But we don't want to just highlight leaf packages, we want to remove unused packages, that is all leaves minus those explicitly installed. So we will feed the solver with this 'explicitly-installed' information. The package history will be the source of this info for now. Maybe later we find some way to store this info that could be used across tools (e.g. directly in the rpm db). So rpmorphan will be able to use this info as well. #13: Pavol Rusnak (prusnak) (2009-01-19 15:44:26) (reply to #12) Yes, that's good idea. Detecting leaf packages is the first step. Detecting which ones to remove (i.e. not explicitly installed) is the second. I think that rpmorphan shows all leaf packages, but it selects only the ones that start with "lib". If we strictly followed library packaging policy that would do the trick. btw. rpmorphan is packaged in Contrib (http://en.opensuse.org/Contrib) #14: Michal Smrž (ilfirin) (2009-03-07 20:05:22) (reply to #11) I am afraid of using rpmorphan to do this. Cause last time, I tested it, it wants to remove libdvdnav and libdvdcss libraries. This is very bad. It leads to many not advanced users to ask in phorums "Why OpenSUSE is not playing DVDs anymore?" I see many problems this could make. #15: Christoph Thiel (cthiel1) (2009-04-21 15:23:06) We don't have the resources to implementing this. Seems to be a prefect fit for a community project. #17: Piotrek Juzwiak (benderbendingrodriguez) (2009-04-22 07:58:47) Maybe the idea to accomplish this would be simply by using the packages. xml file and diff it. We can already export what packages we got right? So if it would compare the packages.xml before installation and after it would then delete it. There is a problem when installing many packages, they would all have to be "grouped" which pulled which dependencies. #20: Vladimirs Kuzmins (vovachaka) (2009-10-26 16:27:51) This feature is a specially important, now when we have distro upgrade, which changes a lot of dependencies and a lot of obsolete packages remain installed. Please, someone implement it! #21: Thomas Göttlicher (tgoettlicher) (2009-10-26 16:41:29) I've added a view for orphaned packages in yast2-qt-pkg. There is a package group "orphaned packages" similar to "suggested packages" and "recommended packages" in yast2-qt-pkg version 2.18.17. #22: Atri Bhattacharya (badshah400) (2009-10-31 14:55:26) (reply to #21) Thanks for implementing this much needed feature. But this feature does not work with the gtk interface in 11.2 RC2; please have this added for the final release of 11.2. #23: Kornél Jahn (cornail) (2009-11-02 07:48:05) (reply to #21) Tried to test this but didn't seem to work on RC2: Orphaned packages view is empty. E.g. installed blender, which pulled yafray. After uninstalling blender, yafray remained installed but didn't show up as an orphaned package. Also installing audacity or inkscape pulled a lot of dependencies which were not showed as orphaned after uninstalling them. #24: Kornél Jahn (cornail) (2009-11-02 08:06:38) (reply to #23) Since it is marked as done, I filed a bug for it: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=551771 (https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=551771) #25: Ján Kupec (jkupec) (2009-11-30 14:18:55) (reply to #21) There has been a misunderstanding here. What Thomas implemented is a view of packages that no longer have update candidates (those which are probably no longer maintained, thus 'orphaned'). This very fate request (IMO) incorrectly uses the word 'orphaned' for what is better described as "unused packages" or "no longer needed packages", or "unnecessary packages". Definitely not orphans (deborphan/rpmorphan is also a misfortunate name IMO). Anyway, whether orphan or unused, this feature is not implemented yet, thus i'm reopening it for 11.3. #26: Ján Kupec (jkupec) (2009-11-30 14:21:27) reopening for 11.3 (see comment #25) #27: Ján Kupec (jkupec) (2009-11-30 14:30:44) I suggest to call these packages unused instead of orphaned . I don't want to decide this by myself, so please speak up. Here are my arguments: 1) the word 'orphan' describes something that has lost its parent(s). In this case, it is actually the child that was lost - a package that depended on other package has been removed. The parent package is still installed, but there's no more use for it - it's unused . 2) we (and a few other distros and communities as well) already use orphaned to describe packages that are no longer cared for - unmaintained packages, packages dropped from distros. #28: Ján Kupec (jkupec) (2009-11-30 15:05:21) (reply to #27) Thomas suggests that perhaps not needed (or no longer needed ) would be better than unused since 'unused' can be confused with 'not used by user' rather than 'not used by other packages'. #29: Roberto Mannai (robermann79) (2009-11-30 15:40:37) Undependent packages : packages which don't have any(more) dependency. #30: Kornél Jahn (cornail) (2009-11-30 16:15:08) I also support the not needed / no longer needed version. Orphaned is bad since it can be misunderstood, just like "undependent package", if Roberto meant to suggest it as a description for this phenomenon. Case A: If I install manually package X, which doesn't have any dependencies nor is it referred to by any other package, it is not a "not needed" one. 'Cause it was manually installed by the user. Case B: Package X is installed automatically as a dependency while installing package Y. Package Y is then removed, but X stays, with no other package referring to it as a dependency. X is then a "not needed" package. + #31: Roberto Mannai (robermann79) (2009-11-30 17:00:02) (reply to #30) + +1 Kornél + Regarding Case A: of course "not needed package" is a subset + "undependent package" - "not needed" catches the user's point of view + and it is more precise. Nevertheless, determining that "not needed" + packages is a hard job, so it could be a good starting point just + knowing which are the "undependent" ones (at least as a first step). -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/300758