The infamous orphan desaster (experience report)

[wobo]

I had Cauldron (64-bit) installed on my laptop, focused on Gnome including gnome-shell. It ran nicely when I last checked updates (3 weeks ago). Getting my hands back on computer hardware after being away in hospital for 3 weeks I checked on this installation and did a 'urpmi --auto-update'. No problems with that, so (being in Cauldron anyway) I decided to play "obedient user" and did the 'urpmi --auto-orphans' command right after that, uninstalling more than 120 packages. Well, bad idea - very BAD idea!

After reboot I had no Gnome any more. The GDM showed Icewm as only choice but logging in only restarted the x server and showed the login screen again. I checked the files on tty0, complete Gnome was gone! So I said 'urpmi task-gnome' which installed some 110 packages (including suggestions). Rebooting took me into the gnome-shell allright but all settings were gone, all plugins were gone (like the complete gstreamer* needed for video playback). No sound possible (sound configuration does not show any sound device although harddrake shows both of them!), etc. I had a totally new system before me as if I installed from scratch.

Now, being Cauldron anyway, this did no real harm to my soul, it even gave me a reason to avoid house-keeping work for another hour (left the sound issue for another day), but I may have some nightmares tonight imagining this happening to my productive system!

[doktor5000]

I think this infamous orphans message should neither be shown by rpmdrake nor urpmi, as this has caused too much breakage for many users. And to be honest, actually they are nearly recommended to do this, IIRC the message is: "The following packages are orphans, you can remove them with urpme --auto-orphans." Those who really want it can always run urpme --auto-orphans, but overall this does more harm than help.
But at least it should be completely removed from rpmdrake.

[jkerr82508]

https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=920

Jim

[wobo]

Yes, I know that one, still I had to let go some of the steam