Removing unneeded old dependencies
 

Hello. I've recently switched from Gentoo to Fedora Core 4. As a ex-gentoo (probably for a not a long period of time if i'll find fedora well too bloated), i find very dificult to accomodate with yum. I've googled for a problem and I didn't found any answer. The problem is that i don't know how to clean unneeded pacakges (dependencies no longer needed) with yum. Does yum has a option like gentoo's or is there any way to do it without yum.

And i have another question: can i have a kde/qt only fedora... without gtk/gnome stuff (mainly without gnome because i use firefox and gaim), without breaking dependency tree?

" or is there any way to do it without yum."

You can do it with command line rpm. Some example commands are:

list all installed packages
rpm -qa | sort | less

check for dependencies for package binutils
rpm --test -e binutils

remove binutils
rpm -e binutils

what package provides mount
rpm -q --whatprovides /bin/mount

See:
man rpm

And i have another question: can i have a kde/qt only fedora... without gtk/gnome stuff (mainly without gnome because i use firefox and gaim), without breaking dependency tree?

Partially. You can remove the portions of gnome which provides the desktop. But if you have at least one gnome application installed then you will have various gtk libraries installed to service those applications.

---------------------------------
Steve Stites

Maybee i didn't make myself understood but my problem is like the following:

I install e.g. gimp. so it installs e.g. gd as its dependency. Up until here it's ok. But what if i want to remove gimp? Is there a way to remove gd automagicly if it isn't used by other packages?

will prompt you to remove gd, gimp and whatever other packages depend on gd (not exactly what you want I know, but closer than other answers)

You see, "gd" is a regular package just like "gimp"; and there is no real way to tell whether you installed a package because you wanted the package's functionality itself (like gimp) or if you installed a package to satisfy another package's dependency (like gd in your case). What if you really wanted the functionality provided by the gd package alone (and not just wanted to have it around to satisfy dependencies)? There is no way for the package manager to tell that. All it knows is that gd is installed; and it is not necessary to remove it.

Thank you for all your answers; but today i had switched back to gentoo. The thing is that i would still like a binary/packages distribution, but with what i have tried so far, i couldn't find something with strong package management system. I want a package management that installs only what I need (not fancy dependencies) and that assures me that after a month of usage won't bloat my system with >2000 binaries from which more than 50% are from dependencies no longer needed; i feel like i want a gentoo-rpm style :).

Anyway thank you for your answers. I hope that one day i will find what i'm looking for.