[CentOS] Re: Using Synaptic with Cent OS 4.4

Edward Diener eldiener at tropicsoft.com
Tue Nov 14 11:49:24 UTC 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.

That is good to know.

> 
> One should not remove packages (IMHO) with any GUI tool.

I do not agree with this. In Synaptic I am always told which other 
packages will be removed if I attempt to remove a given package, and I 
am given the opportunity to back out of removing the package. OK, YumEx 
does not have this functionality. It would be nice if it were addded, 
but that is OK.

But leaving off our diagreement, how to I find out from yum itself what 
other packages are dependent on a given package ? I could not find a 
simple yum command which will tell me this for a given package. The only 
related yum command seems to tell me what packages a given package 
depends on, but that is not the same thing about which I am asking.




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