Your screen is too small...

[wobo]

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>

[wilcal]

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.

[winstonteacox]

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

[jaywalker]

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.

[doktor5000]

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

[jaywalker]

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

[doktor5000]

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

[jaywalker]

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.