dpkg vs. rpm [LWN.net]

dpkg vs. rpm

Posted Mar 6, 2012 7:30 UTC (Tue) by Felix.Braun (subscriber, #3032)
In reply to: Another bailout by mathstuf
Parent article: Shuttleworth on the Ubuntu 12.04 desktop

I have tried Fedora twice to replace my Ubuntu laptop. I still haven't found a replacement for aptitude in the rpm-world. I like to know why every package on my system has been pulled in. Aptitude lets me inspect this information and automatically removes all packages that are not necessary anymore if the reason for their installation gets removed later on.

While all of this is theoretically possible on a rpm-based distro. I haven't found the tool to make this sort of operation practical. As far as I understand, the extension yum-autoremove-leaves is not recommended. Maybe this is because there is no tool that allows users to mark packages as "autoremovable". If there is one, I would like to know because I might try to install Fedora again in the future.

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dpkg vs. rpm

Posted Mar 6, 2012 7:40 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Yeah, that plugin is...less than perfect. The yum history mechanism works really well though for undoing installs of things, but it does fall down when things get tangled after some time has passed. ISTR yum remembering reasons for a package's installation, but I don't know if things are wired up to it.

dpkg vs. rpm

Posted Mar 6, 2012 18:00 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> ISTR yum remembering reasons for a package's installation, but I don't know if things are wired up to it.

Indeed, any release with yumdb can get the reason a package was installed with:

yumdb get reason $pkg_wildcard

A tool could filter out the reason = user packages, determine what has nothing depending on it and go from there. It could also allow the user to change the reason to something specific (e.g., $project-development) which could then be removed if you stop working on $project for whatever reason.

dpkg vs. rpm

Posted Mar 6, 2012 16:50 UTC (Tue) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link]

Aptitude lets me inspect this information and automatically removes all packages that are not necessary anymore

urpme --auto-orphans

dpkg vs. rpm

Posted Mar 7, 2012 6:53 UTC (Wed) by michich (subscriber, #17902) [Link]

yum now has the option 'clean_requirements_on_remove'. If enabled, removing a package works like with the remove-with-leaves plugin, but better:
http://skvidal.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/orphaned-dep-clea...