2010/2/5 P.J. Eby <p...@telecommunity.com>: > At 01:55 AM 2/5/2010 +0100, Tarek Ziadé wrote: >> >> I think it's still useful, because it points the root packages that >> can be removed >> safely without breaking the system -- even if leaving orphaned packages >> behind. >> >> Any opinion ? > > I think it's a good idea to have a way to tell what packages were *not* > installed to satisfy dependencies. > > Merely plotting the dependency graph doesn't tell you this, because you > could have a non-root orphan - i.e., something that was installed to fill a > dependency, but the depender(s) have now vanished. > > I guess what I'm saying is, a thing that is not needed by anything else > could either be an orphan (due to other uninstalls) *or* a root (manually > chosen for install), and there is no way to tell them apart just by > following the graph.
I am wondering *when* the depender(s) may vanish like that, leaving behind them orphaned dependencies. I guess this can happen when: 1/ a package (*looks like we can't help it calling a distribution a package after all...*) is removed by another tool that it was installed with. 2/ something goes wrong during uninstallation So I wonder : will 1/ really happen that often ? and shouldn't 2/ be taken care by the high-level uninstaller ? Regards Tarek -- Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
