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