Beta 3, dependency handling - question about orphans

[doktor5000]

Hi again. Fair warning most of this is going to sound pretty negative so let me say first overall using the Mageia-3-beta3-LiveDVD-KDE4-x86_64-DVD.iso has been smooth sailing. Only thing that threw me during the install was the bootloader password. Maybe I'm just dense but I didn't understand the password option on that screen for the bootloader. Maybe change the text to something like "Do you want to set a password for the bootloader?" or simply "bootloader password". Again I can be a little dense at times so maybe it's just me:)

Played around with KDE for awhile but honestly KDE just doesn't suit my tastes so I decided to install XFCE. No problems with the install and getting XFCE set up. Once I had XFCE running I decided to do a little housecleaning and remove KDE and this where it gets bad. Using the graphical software widget dependency handling is just plain bad. Removing KDE also uninstalls several unrelated programs, most notably the entire LibreOffice suite and gksu. Although it removes LibreOffice it left all the autocorrects, hypen rules and thesarus(mythes) files. Plus the graphical software widget now informs me several hundred files are now orphans including Thunar and several other components of XFCE. Needless to say the fact it wants to remove some key components of my DE makes the rest of the list suspect. And more importantly if these files truly are orphans why weren't they removed with their 'parent' program?

The orphan list minus the LibreOffice leftovers.


Also I'd like to point out that XFCE download includes the Fortune-mod which is labeled as a dependency of XFCE4-settings and xscreensaver.

Sorry to sound so negative as this release is really looking good otherwise.

edit> Out of curiosity I started down the list of orphans to see what would happen and came to lib64llvmradeon9.1.1. Even though this file is listed as an orphan if you select it for removal it wants to take a good chunk of the system with it. screenshot http://www.imagebam.com/image/7c8a0c245781699

[ghmitch]

I certainly have experienced that situation on the orphan side. I get a long list of orphan packages spewing out on rpmdrake and I ignore it because most of the packages on the list are bogus. And, actually, I have seen some pretty bizarre dependencies as well over time, but not recently. But then I have really paid attention to this issue recently either.

[labatts]

I must admit, I am curious about this is well. I read doctor5000's sticky about the orphaned packages, and here I am with about 100 things that it thinks are orphaned. Some examples are dolphin, gwenview, something about mousepads that sounds important, etc.

Same as lcjr, I don't want to sound negative. I really like this distro. I just find it wierd that the only solution to these orphaned packages is for me to manually decided which ones are important. Also, I find it wierd that there seems to be no way to address the orphans in the GUI, which otherswise seems great. However, it gives the irritating message about orphans after every package install.

A quick fix would be some way to disable the ophaned packages message. However, I would rather there be a simpler way to actually fix the orphaned packages. I simply do not trust myself to figure out which ones my system actually needs (nor do I really want to).

[doktor5000]

Well, the orphans message should have changed, at least in rpmdrake.
In your case, probably task-kde4 got removed, hence some of the KDE parts are correctly marked as orphans.

If you don't have a problem with disk space, i'd say just ignore the orphans message.
And yes, the orphans handling is not optimal, and there should be a way to say "Ahh, i don't care about those orphaned packages, leave me alone".
You might want to take a look at qt4urpm, IIRC it includes orphans handling. Has been created by two members of former mandrivauser.de community:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/qt4urpm/

Also, there is a commandline way to unmark orphans ...

[doktor5000]

In your case, probably task-kde4 got removed.

Okay, yes. This was a big help. The first two things that I did when I installed mageia was to remove apper and konqueror. I don't believe apper created any issues -- possible the orphaned kpackagekit package. However, when I installed task-kde4-minimal, that removed most of the silly orphans (dolphin, etc).

I manually removed a few more things that looked important (x11-driver-blahblahs, etc) and then took the auto-orphan plunge. It apparently was a success.

So, I think I begin to understand. First, it seems like it is a good idea to run the auto-orphans on a fresh install, since there were a messload of language pack things that were orphaned (my system seems fine, so I assume I didn't need them). Second, perhaps it is less annoying to have konqueror lying around than a bunch of orphaned kde stuff.

In the meantime, I will check out qt4urpm. Thanks again for the help!

[doktor5000]

Well, actually you created the problem yourself. First, you didn't "properly" remove those KDE 4 packages. If you would have only removed them,
and not their dependencies, task-kde4 would not have been removed, hence not so much/not any orphaned package. And reinstalling task-kde4-minimal
only fixes or let's better say workarounds part of the problem ...

If you don't exactly understand, how orphans mechanism works, and what it really does, then best leave it alone.
If you think https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Removing_packages can still be improved, or needs more links from the forum
here, or more ATTENTION signs or stuff like that, feel free to use the discussion tab on that page in the wiki, or discuss it here.

If you have more questions about orphans, don't hesitate to ask.

IMHO the biggest part of the problem comes from the fact, that the end user has a totally different expectation, what auto-orphans
does or he thinks it does, then what it was actually intended for. Maybe some people wnat to compare it with auto-purge mechanism
of apt-get or some magical cleanup mechanism. But actually it only does what it was intended for, not more or less.

[labatts]

I have not doubt that I did something wrong. I know that the orphans are becoming orphans for a reason that is sane. However, I have no idea what I possible could have done differently.

Using Mageia Control Center, I uninstalled Konqueror and Apper. That is all. Perhaps there is a toggle for not uninstalling dependancies that I did not notice? Heck, until your help, I did not even know that there was a package called task-kde4. I certainly did not uninstall it (or rather, I did not click on the toggle to uninstall it.)

Mostly, I think you are right in that I could just let it alone. It is my impression that other distros do not have a feature such as this, and so "ophaned" packages go un-noticed. No?

[labatts]

I also did not mean to Bogart this forum. Sorry for that. Thanks again for the help and conversation. I think the community behind this distro is the best thing going, really.

[doktor5000]

Well, i didn't say that to remove such core packages you could use rpmdrake, without removing dependencies
What you could have done is remove them via rpm -e --nodeps, but that's not something to recommend as good practice ...

What you could do now is to rpm -Uhv --nodeps url-to-task-kde.rpm

And no need to be sorry, questions and constructive criticism is always welcome

From what i know, only Debian has a good cleanup mechanism, called autoremove, which works more granularly.
But to be fair, if you compare urpmi against other common rpm package managers, like yum or zypper, those
lack actually many useful features, which urpmi supports since ages.

[ghmitch]

I just encountered yet another example of dependency stupidity. My Mageia 3 system running on BtrFS just did a hard crash due to "out of memory" errors. The problem turned out to be akonadi respawning over and over and absorbing exponential amounts of cpu and memory. But you can't take out akonadi without taking out the KDE address book. Why on earth must the simple old KDE address book now be dependent on the akonadi device syncronization server? Why can't it just run as a stand alone anymore. I neither want or need a dev sync server. This is becoming like Apple or MS. I only hope that I can repair the file system after all the work I put into it. And I will have to find a replacement for the KDE address book app since akonadi along with nepomuk and some of the other apps that have a long reputation of doing this mischief are coming out. - George

[doktor5000]

That has nothing to do with Mageia and is an upstream decision, please differentiate more.

[ghmitch]

Thanks for pointing that out. I DO understand that it is KDE and probably in particular one or more KDE developers that are driving this issue. I have REALLY nothing but good to say about Mageia and all of you who are making such an effort to make it what it is. But please, please, do whatever you can to pass some of this feedback upstream for us. You DO know who the key people at KDE are and how to discuss these issues with them. 1) There is absolutely no sensible reason that apps like kaddressbook, korganizer, kalarm, kjots or kmail should REQUIRE an app like akonadi. 2) There is absolutely no reason why an app like akonadi should be so poorly writen as to enable it to unilaterally eat up all of system memory due to the presence of a bug. 3) There is absolutely no reason why the Linux kernel should allow ONE app to use up all of system memory AND that is NOT a KDE problem, but is a problem for the kernel developers. There should be a configurable per app quota on memory built into the Linux kernel. At this point I am back up on my Mageia 3 BtrFS RAID 1 system after successfully doing an external scrub on it from another Mageia 3 system installed on the same box. At that point as soon as I brought the BtrFS system up, I went immediately to console via alt cntr F2, logged in as root and did 'rpm -e --nodeps akonadi`. I then logged on and for the first time knemo came right up and worked flawlessly. So I STRONGLY suspect that akonadi was behind my knemo problem. Thanks again for being so helpful. I certainly did not mean to insinuate any criticism toward you as Mageia devs for a problem that is totally external to your organization. But I really needed to vent as it was a very discouraging situation. - George

[doktor5000]

You might want to take a look at qt4urpm, IIRC it includes orphans handling. Has been created by two members of former mandrivauser.de community:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/qt4urpm/

For completeness sake, i've just seen that qt4urpm is available directly from Mageia core repositories,
and it offers rather complete orphans handling, allowing to un-orphan a single package from the list or to uninstall it:

Bildschirmfoto2_19.png (44.13 KiB) Viewed 3150 times

[ghmitch]

I just tried to install kcalc, only to find that it had a long, long list of dependency requirements. So I gave up on that and went to the gnome calculator. It required ZERO dependencies. KDE truly is becoming dependency hell! HOW can a simple calculator be dependent and an endless list of other packages in order to be functional? Its unreal. - George

[doktor5000]

Depends how many kde/gnome/qt/gtk packages you already have installed. Also you're comparing apples and oranges.

[ghmitch]

Its a system that has NEITHER KDE nor Gnome installed. Only LXDE. I REALLY like KDE a lot more than Gnome, but it certainly seems to be getting more and more like a mess of spaghetti in terms of its architecture. Apples to oranges? Who could dispute that in comparing KDE to Gnome?

[doktor5000]

LXDE is based on GTK, so you will have a lot of GTK/GNOME packages already installed. Deducting from your system/current setup, that KDE is a dependency hell is plain wrong.

If you don't like it, then don't use it. But just complaining helps nobody, only decreases the mood over time.
Also this is becoming quite offtopic in this thread.