* Martin Schlander
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.
From your description, it looks as if the non-oss pattern has a hard requirement to RealPlayer. It should be a weak dependency instead. I'd consider this a bug.
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.
Please file a bug report for such things.
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.
;-} smart doesn't know anything about pattern. So this is certainly an example of 'package dependency hell' we'd like to address in the future.
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 do not know either but I'm highly interested in any suggestions.
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.
A lot of current pattern and package dependencies are certainly too strong. The question is, where to start to make them weaker without risking an 'unusable' system. Of course, the definition of 'unusable' is a different one for everybody ... Klaus --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org