Re: [yast2-gtk] Unneeded dependencies and Packagekit handling

[Ricardo Cruz]

Quoting Atri <badsh...@gmail.com>:
> 1. Suggest packagekit to quit when it conflicts with yast sw_single
> https://features.opensuse.org/309367

I opened this one as a bug report to see if we can get it fixed
at the appropriate level:

https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=659522

----/-/-----

What about that unneeded packages dialog? Did you manage
to run it through gdb to get the call stack:
gdb --args /usr/lib/YaST2/bin/y2base sw_single gtk
run
*crash*
backtrace

Do tell me how accurate it works for you... It shows quite
a lot of false positives for me, as I previously reported:

By the way, it seems this feature is still disabled in svn trunk
from when I momentarily suspended it for a osc build a few days
ago.
Okay, re-enabled the thing back. Tell me if it there's a problem
compiling.

----/-/-----

It's interesting that Ubuntu does have a feature like this
in its packaging system (or is it only at the apt-get level?).

In Ubuntu 10.10 (and possibly before), when you use apt-get
for whatever, apt-get will tell you there are some dependencies
no longer being used, and you can then do a apt-get autoremove.

It does feel good to have a tidy system... libzypp does have that
flag to remove unneeded dependencies when removing a package.
But I guess the crucial data missing, in order to offer the feature
retroactively, is information on why was the package installed --
libzypp can assume that the package being removed is likely a leaf
package, because that's the only kind of package the user would want
to remove manually.
Come to think of it, I guess that's why the flag is not enabled
by default. The process may not be 100% fool-proof. I wonder
if you remove banshee-plugin-X, and that's the only plugin you
have installed, whether banshee itself would be removed. ;D

You could try to probe them about adding a method to list
unneeded packages. Preferably through the libzypp mailing list,
so we have a permanent record of the reply. ;) Because the thing is,
I am not sure we can offer a reliable solution from our vantage point...

Our problem is not that we don't know if a package was installed
by the user or as a dependency. Well, that's _one_ problem, but
not the main one I think, because reading libzypp logs file we can
at least avoid false positives.

Our problem is that libzypp doesn't export a way to tell the
dependencies of a given package. Say we know that package X
was installed as a dependency -- how do we know if it's still
required? All we have to work with are the RPM strings, and
possibly we can simulate it being removed and see whether
the dependency resolver complains or not.
I am not sure either method will work well enough: I have
already asked them about being able to get the dependencies
of a package in an usable form: feel free to insist with them. ;)

Cheers,
Ricardo

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[Atri Bhattacharya]

Sorry Ricardo to be so late in testing this one. But the gdb testing just does not work out. There is no backtrace and it asks me to install a few debuginfo packages which are not even available. As the dialog just does not work for I cannot even test whether it shows too many false positives. But if you think that happens, and I understand why it does, I think we can leave the dialog box thing off our radar for the present.



--
Atri
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