[CentOS] Re: Using Synaptic with Cent OS 4.4

Tue Nov 14 06:44:00 UTC 2006
Johnny Hughes <mailing-lists at hughesjr.com>

On Mon, 2006-11-13 at 17:07 -0500, Edward Diener wrote:
> Johnny Hughes wrote:
> > On Mon, 2006-11-13 at 13:07 -0500, Edward Diener wrote:
> >> Can Synaptic be used successfully on CentOS 4.4 instead of YumEx ? Are 
> >> there any issues using Synaptic with the CentOS 4.4 repositories ?
> >>
> > 
> > There is a version of apt and synaptic for i386 in the extras
> > repository... however I would not recommend it.  There are many plugins
> > for yum that work with yem/yumex that do not work for apt (fastest
> > mirror, protectbase, etc.,)
> > 
> > So, things like 3rd Party repos and the like become more dangerous in
> > apt that with yum on CentOS.
> > 
> > Also, apt is ONLY for 1386 distro as the version we have does not do
> > multilib arches.
> 
> The reason I asked is because YumeEx 1.02 does not show the packages 
> which depend on a given package when I specify a package I want to 
> remove. In Synaptic when I specify that I want to remove a package I am 
> immediately shown the packages which depend on it and if I proceed to 
> remove it, Synaptic automatically removes those packages, but I can 
> choose to Cancel the removal immediately.
> 
> It may be that in YumEx, after adding a package to be removed to the 
> Queue, does prompt one about the other packages which depend on that 
> package and automatically removes when I process the Queue, letting me 
> back out of the removal once I am prompted, but I did not try it for 
> fear that I might remove a package needed by other packages.
> 
> In general I try to keep packages at a minimum for what I will actually 
> be using on a Linux system, and after an installation I go through the 
> packages installed and remove any extraneous ones. YumEx appears to make 
> this much harder than Synaptic. That is why I was hoping that I could 
> use Synaptic instead.
> 

Yum can not remove items that are needed by other programs ... it will
fail the dependency checks.

One should not remove packages (IMHO) with any GUI tool.  Heck, I don't
even remove packages with yum, but individually and from the command
line.  I could tell you about a machine where I used yum to remove a
file and it's dependencies, didn't pay attention to the file list, and
it tried to remove glibc ... and I can duplicate that same problem in
apt.  (A machine will break part of the way though removing glibc and it
is not pretty :P)

Removing packages with auto dependency resolution is dangerous (IMHO)
and should be avoided.

What do other think about this?
 
   
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