Why Is Software I Removed During Setup Wanting To Be Installed Again?

English Applications
1

During openSUSE 13.1’s install, I un-selected a bunch of programs I would never use (stuff like libreoffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc), and after install, such programs aren’t installed. After adding repositories for Wine and fglrx and then installing them through YaST2, I noticed it also chose to install Thunderbird and kdeartwork4-wallpapers (I think also flash player). I set them to Never Install though, and both fglrx and Wine installed and work fine.

I now wanted to install VLC via their one-click installer, and in YaST2, I’m seeing (almost?) every package I uninstalled being selected for install under Installation Summary. Why? I’m 99% certain none of those things I un-selected during install would be a dependency for VLC, Wine, or fglrx, and I figured since I un-selected them during install, that meant I didn’t want them.

I’m using KDE with openSUSE 13.1 x86_64 if it helps.

2

There are sometimes inter dependencies. Also sometimes program may use stuff from other programs if they are available. If not there may be some features that don’t work. ie sometimes dependencies are hard ( you got to have them) and sometimes soft (nice to have them)

Are you so short on space that you must exclude these programs. Just cause they are installed does not mean you have to use them. Since Thunderbird is not normallly installed by default not sure why you would see any dependency requiring it. Firefox may supply some rendering or connection service like connection to web based help. But the dependencies are hard coded in the RPM’s and normally have a reason to be there.

3

On 2014-01-13 04:36, Espionage724 wrote:

> I now wanted to install VLC via their one-click installer, and in YaST2,
> I’m seeing (almost?) every package I uninstalled being selected for
> install under Installation Summary. Why? I’m 99% certain none of those
> things I un-selected during install would be a dependency for VLC, Wine,
> or fglrx, and I figured since I un-selected them during install, that
> meant I didn’t want them.

Because they are wanted by dependencies of other packages, or the
selected patterns.

You have to manually select those to “never install” or “taboo”.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 12.3 x86_64 “Dartmouth” at Telcontar)

4

I can never understand all this not letting stuff install
It’s not like they take up that much room on a modern HDD

Once you start installing multimedia - much of it is tied to browser plugins and such…
Hence what you removed it pulled back in

5

I don’t mind necessarily that it sits on my HDD (I have a 2TB drive and barely use over 100GB of it), but having to keep such software updated on my slow DSL connection is a pain. My stripped 13.1 install downloaded and installed updates within like 10-15 minutes; a default install is getting up to 20 minutes now with just downloads…

Of course though, since I really don’t plan on using some software anyway, what’s the point in having it (aside from dependencies)? I’ll have Firefox, Konqueror, and Google Chrome installed as web browsers, meanwhile, I’ll only be using Chrome, I’ll have some KDE games installed that i’ll never play, and I’ll have an entire Office suite I’ll never intend to use (I have Google Drive). It’s essentially like getting a new Windows computer with tons of OEM bloatware and programs on it (only without the slowdown I suppose).

I suppose it can’t be helped though if it’s dependencies requiring the software to be installed. I still can’t really see why fglrx or Wine would require anything to do with KDE4 wallpapers though.

Edit: Now that I think about it, I can’t really recall such a problem when using Ubuntu (and variants), and there’s a good bit of packages I manually remove (mainly the same stuff I mentioned; Firefox, Thunderbird, etc). Maybe there’s something I’m just not understanding?

6

fglrx and wine don’t require anything to do with KDE4 wallpapers.
But the KDE4 wallpapers might be recommended by some already installed package or pattern and therefore YaST/zypper wants to install it. To avoid this, you could activate “Ignore Recommended Packages For Already Installed Packages” in the “Options” menu, the corresponding option in /etc/zypp/zypp.conf, if you want to make it the system default, is:

##
## Whether required packages are installed ONLY
## So recommended packages, language packages and packages which depend
## on hardware (modalias) will not be regarded.
##
## Valid values: boolean
## Default value: false
##
# solver.onlyRequires = false

As has already been mentioned, mark the packages you don’t want to have installed as “Taboo – Never Install” (right-click on the package). Then they won’t ever get installed automatically.

Or, if you uninstall a package it gets added to the “SoftLock” list and won’t get installed automatically again either if it can be avoided.

7

On 2014-01-13 07:16, Espionage724 wrote:
> I don’t mind necessarily that it sits on my HDD (I have a 2TB drive and
> barely use over 100GB of it), but having to keep such software updated
> on my slow DSL connection is a pain.

I can understand that: I have the same problem. But I do need those huge
programs. However, on test systems I remove libreoffice as you do. It
never comes back if you set it up to never install, or taboo the upgrades.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 12.3 x86_64 “Dartmouth” at Telcontar)

8

Ah, thanks for the clarifications. Seems to be just a misunderstanding on my end as to how YaST works, but I understand now.