Mageia forum

I found an old Mageia2 Alpha2 on my desktop machine, working ok with KDE. Now I removed task-kde (which took care of 2/3 of the installed system, did a 'urpme --auto-orphans' and rebooted.

This resulted in "coould not log bootup: Address already in use" and a permanent hang - had to use the power switch to get out of this. Then I booted into failsafe and installed task-gnome because I was sure that the auto-orphans function took important packages away (I already reported at another such occasion), Rebooting took me into a console login with error messages about "nouveau" - a sign that auto-orphans also killed the working proprietary nvidia driver!

Now I started the ncurses variant of MCC to reconfigure the nvidia driver. The card was correctly recognized, I was asked about the proprietary driver and after saying "I do" I saw the start of downloading for a split second - then the screen was cleared and the error message said:

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Your screen is too small for this application.
Resize the screen and restart the application.
Press Ctrl+c to exit

Of course this has nothing to do with screen resolution (monoitor was recognized correctly). It was caused by a failing network connection.

<rant>
In short: again the auto-orphans function destroyed the system, this time for good. Dependencies or not - it can not be that removing KDE renders a basic system unusable - example: how could the dkms system (proprietary nvidia driver) become an orphan after removiong a desktop system?

Easy answer: there is a wrong dependency between a desktop package and a system package (which causes other system files to be "orphaned" which results in destruction. THAT is a bug!

Of course, as this was a test installation anyway and as it seems useless to make developpers aware of this systematic bug, I just let it be.
</rant>

A general question concerning orphans. If one just
left the orphans alone would that have a detrimental
effect on the present install, and future upgrades?
Even if those orphans took up 100's of megabytes of
hd space.

There are no detrimental side effects, and if your / - partition is big enough (let's say 10 to 15GB) there should be no problem even for the next 5 years ...
And in this time you will do a new install anyway because of a new PC ...


cheers,
Bernd

I can see a problem, though admittedly I have probably spent less time thinking about it than previous responders; no time at all in fact.

The problem I see is that in donating my disc space to hide the problem caused by a packaging bug, I have contributed NOTHING to the task of ensuring such bugs are identified and properly dealt with. Furthermore, I will have accepted the undesirable side-effect of having future updates waste my bandwidth and time in completely superfluous replacement of all those unnecessary packages. This may have some future unintended side-effects which may bring about system instability or even holes in my system security.

Furthermore, the cost of upgrading to a larger filesystem than optimum just to allow space for packaging bugs is not in my budget.

Feel free to point out some of those packaging bugs, or report them so they can get fixed.

I cannot add anything to the bug found by wobo, but I have recorded elsewhere the newly introduced dependency problems with two packages (they seem to share the same dependency problem).

I have no experience of packaging, but I will try to learn enough to make a stab at identifying the problem with these two (mageia-kde4-config-common and Default-kde4-config). To start me off, can you tell me if it is possible to examine the dependency tree of a package after it has been installed, or do I need to examine the actual rpm file?

Richard

jaywalker wrote:I have no experience of packaging, but I will try to learn enough to make a stab at identifying the problem with these two (mageia-kde4-config-common and Default-kde4-config). To start me off, can you tell me if it is possible to examine the dependency tree of a package after it has been installed, or do I need to examine the actual rpm file?

Sure, you can query the dependencies from an installed package like so:

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rpm -q --requires mageia-kde4-config-common    (shows the packages/facilities it directly requires)

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rpm -q --provides mageia-kde4-config-common    (shows the facilities it provides)

You can recursively query the packages which are required by a package (query runs across enabled urpmi repositories) like so:

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urpmq --requires-recursive mageia-kde4-config-common

You can recursively query the packages which require a package (query runs across enabled urpmi repositories) like so:

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urpmq --whatrequires-recursive mageia-kde4-config-common

Thankyou, that's enough to get me started and I have plenty of time just now while I wait for tonight's updates to download.