On Tue, 14 Nov 2006, Johnny Hughes wrote:
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?
I agree completely. Yum is great for installing packages and their dependencies. It is dangerous to remove packages with yum. I only remove with "rpm -e".
Barry