I (bare metal) installed Leap 15.5 as a minimal KDE desktop, then immediately changed the repo’s to SlowRoll as described here: openSUSE:Slowroll - openSUSE Wiki. My package selections were not honored: SlowRoll repo’s installed several things without permission: Most of KDE-PIM, Office packages, etc. Upon trying to remove them, I got warnings that packages would be broken if I uninstalled those collections of applications that I neither wanted nor authorized.
SlowRoll is a great idea, but there are some strange things going on with packages. I’m not sure if someone accidentally included their personal package preferences, or made the mistake of including the live iso package list; but repo changes shouldn’t be forcing specific bundles of applications.
Thanks, that’s good to know, as a temporary work-around! Would users keep having to add the ‘–no-recemmends’ at every update, or does the initial zypper dup solve it forever? If so, the instruction page should be corrected.
…unfortunately, it’s not a long-term solution to unnecessary packages being installed in a way that that generates breakage warnings whenever users try to remove them.
You need to familiarize yourself how zypper and openSUSE are working at all. The presetting of openSUSE’s zypper is with “recommends” flag set. That means you get a working desktop with a great set of different tools and packages which cover nearly the complete usecase of a standard user (office, administration, configuration, games, PIM, …). This presetting also leads to a desktop where you don’t need to think about breaking dependencies, because the zypper solver will take care about that.
If you want to outsmart the presetting, you need same basic background knowledge and adjust the settings as nrickert already pointed out (there are much more…). YOU as administrator are then responsible to take care about dependencies. Recommends are often needed to get the full set of capabilities of a particular package working.
This are also basics of how linux (or also other OS) works. If YOU as administrator trys to remove packages you should know what you are doing! The operating system is warning you that you are trying to remove packages which will lead to a broken function or package. So you are complaining that the OS warns you that you are doing some potentially dangerous steps…
You failed to adjust the zypper solver, thats why recommended packages where installed…
That means even if you wouldn’t have exchanged the repos to the slowroll ones, the next zypper up for your Leap 15.5 would have pulled in the same set of packages which you call “unauthorized and unwanted”…