Linux Format forums

ollie · Posted: Sat Oct 18, 2008 9:46 am Post subject:

Hi Marrea

I'm only guessing, because installing vlc from a non-default repository has a similar effect on other distros, that most of the "orphans" relate to media codecs and libraries which have now been replaced from the new vlc repository. The package manager should not make recommendations that will break your system.

Note - IANAME (I Am Not A Mandriva Expert) Wink

spaceyhase · LXF regular Joined: Mon Jun 30, 2008 1:07 pm Posts: 116

Hmm, my wifi is still a little odd. It only seems to pick up the connection and work perfectly if I broadcast the SSID. Soon as it's off, wireless no worky Sad

xfce doesn't seem to install as cleanly as the previous release.

2008 was excellent so it's a shame some of these bugs have crept in. This is on a 'eee' too, seems to most stable (i.e. complete) release for the platform in my opinion.

Marrea · Posted: Sat Oct 18, 2008 5:42 pm Post subject:

Marrea · Posted: Sat Oct 18, 2008 5:45 pm Post subject:

HINTERG · Posted: Sun Oct 19, 2008 8:39 am Post subject:

Raikos, surprised to see you say the X desktop is your second fav after K3. Surely they could not be more different? I have to say that, from my perspective, I have gotten over the wow factor of Compiz/gnome, and am liking X more and more for its snappy performance, low footprint, and easy configurability. Simple fact is, it does not get in the way!
_________________
Trying to stay sane in a crazy world......

Rhakios · Posted: Sun Oct 19, 2008 9:49 am Post subject:

Rhakios · Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2008 8:42 pm Post subject:

Ahem! Well, as it seems from the LXF newsletter that I'm providing "some technical information" on installing Mandriva 2009, I have a tip I'd like to add for when running it. Do not, except with extreme care, run "urpme --auto-orphans" after the software installer suggests it. I have tried it three times, and twice it has killed the desktop I've been using.
I'm not sure exactly what procedure it uses for assessing what is an orphan, but from what I can tell, it seems that if you install a substantial amount of software for an alternate desktop (say you are running XFCE and install some KDE components) it gets rid of packages essential to running your original desktop.
If it can't be trusted on this, then I don't really see that it can be trusted with other package patterns either.
If you aren't all that knowledgeable about what might or might not be essential, and are not confident about restoring things from the command-line, then just say no!
_________________
Bye, Rhakios

spaceyhase · LXF regular Joined: Mon Jun 30, 2008 1:07 pm Posts: 116

^ This man speaketh the truth. I've got Xfce on my eee and --auto-orphans wanted to remove it and bust everything >_<

Marrea · Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2008 9:54 pm Post subject:

Marrea · Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2008 10:09 pm Post subject:

You will see here that Adam has taken action on this.

Rhakios · Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2008 10:51 pm Post subject:

Well, Marrea it was in part the fact that I recalled what you wrote about VLC that made me go ahead with accepting the recommendations, the VMWare install was for testing, after all. The fact that it seemed to work just fine the first time of the three no doubt inspired me with a degree of over-confidence on the subsequent occasions. But the we go, one does not learn anything without taking chances.
No doubt if Mandriva were still my main OS, I'd be as regular a visitor to their forums as I used to be, but as it is, I'm not. Still, it's good to see that Adam is still so active in forwarding users' experiences to the developers; employing him is probably one of the better decisions they have made in the recent years.
_________________
Bye, Rhakios

ollie · Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2008 11:56 am Post subject:

It's interesting that a package manager would break a functioning system by "incorrectly" identifying orphan packages that are dependencies for other installed software. It really indicates that urpmi is broken and not suitable for a production environment. (Sorry Adam - it seems that Mandriva just has this history of being broken or not quite finished.)

AdamW · Joined: Thu Apr 17, 2008 12:45 am Posts: 51

There wasn't, technically speaking, any bug. (Well, there's *possibly* a bug in which some update cases a task- package to be removed, but we're not sure about that one yet).

What happens is that, if the task- package for an environment is removed, all the packages for that environment become orphans. This isn't actually a bug - it's exactly what's supposed to happen. Nothing is doing the wrong thing - it's just that the right thing turns out to be a silly thing. Smile

It's easy to cause the task- package for a DE to be removed...say, you have GNOME installed, but you don't want totem, or something. As task-gnome depends on totem, removing totem causes task-gnome to be removed. This would normally have no consequences, because task-gnome is just a metapackage. However, with the orphans feature, it causes everything that task-gnome depends on to become an orphan. This isn't a bug: they really *are* orphans. They were installed as a dependency of task-gnome , and task-gnome got removed, so now they're orphans. It's just...not necessarily what we really want to happen Smile

We are pushing updates to address this by converting almost all the dependencies of the task- packages to be suggests instead of requires. suggests don't get orphaned, so this will mostly avoid the problem occurring. If it turns out that there's still problematic orphan behaviour in some cases, we will disable the "run --auto-orphan now and break your system!" message being displayed by default, which will hide the issue.

But, the important point is that there's no actual bug in urpmi's orphan handling. It does exactly what it's intended to do. We just didn't grok that the intended behaviour would not be the *desired* behaviour in some cases, until it started happening.
_________________
Adam Williamson
Mandriva
Community manager | Newsletter editor | Bugmaster | Proofreader | Translator | Packager

Rhakios · Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2008 9:18 pm Post subject:

Hmm, I'm not sure that's entirely the case. The one time it happened I hadn't removed any software, only installed some (as mentioned above, some KDE stuff on an XFCE desktop).
_________________
Bye, Rhakios

Marrea · Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2008 9:32 pm Post subject:

And in my case all I did was install vlc and I was then advised to remove 160 orphans, three of which were dolphin, kdm and konqueror. I realise there's a lot I still need to learn about the inner workings of Linux package management, but I'm not quite sure why installing a media player requires the removal of a file manager. Confused