I suspect that the "rationale" that this has gone on so long is that its hardly critical. nice yes, a mild limitation yes, but it wont stop your system working, or have dire (note I say dire, not theoretical) security consequences to have a little fluff left on a system. The system may grow, but only so far. I dont believe rpm handles dependencies all that well either (else why do you get into dependency hell so often with them!)
For those who want a totally clean system, they will have to do it by hand anyway (e.g., remove gcc from a firewall and so on) Same deal with being short on disk space - you will have to think carefully. There are a few special cases where removing every trace of a package and its dependencies is highly desirable (and in that case I would argue that a clean install is more appropriate if you REALLY want to know whats there), but for the bulk of users its a non-event. BillK On Fri, 2003-11-21 at 03:30, Jeffrey Smelser wrote: > > I ran gentoo on a system for a few days earlier this year, right up to > > where my system became a casualty of an emerge limitation, > > documented at > > http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/portage-manual.xml : > > > > Warning: Unmerging packages can be dangerous. If you remove any > > core packages your system may cease to function and the > > removal of > > various libraries may cause software to fail. Portage > > does not warn > > you if you are removing core packages or dependencies for other > > packages. > > > > This seems like a critical limitation to me. It means that > > unless I have a > > deep understanding of the dependencies among packages, the number of > > packages on my system can only grow. > > -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
