I’m new here and might be breaking protocols through inexperience and/or ignorance, so apologies in advance if that turns out to be the case…
I have a Tumbleweed installation that was completed by selecting the KDE-desktop option in the installer, but then removing as much software as possible at the review-screen prior to starting the install proper. I mention this because my query looks to me to be pattern-related.
This morning, ‘zypper dup’ wanted to install 335 packages as upgrades, which is fine, along with upgrades to 10 currently installed patterns, which is a first on this 3-month old system.
It also wanted to install 7 new patterns and 164 new packages, none of which I want.
If I were to do ‘zypper dup --no-recommends’ it would do just the upgrades with nothing new, but I’d like to know if a better method might be to remove the offending patterns from the original install so that this doesn’t happen any time there’s another pattern-upgrade in the future?
It looks to me like ‘patterns-kde-kde’ is pulling in pretty much all of the new stuff, so would I be best advised to ‘zypper rm patterns-kde-kde’ without the ‘-u’ flag, then run a normal ‘dup’, or would that break things that I’m currently unaware of?
Hi @Taipan
I am a novice in the Linux world. I also choose what to install from KDE during installation. However, I set the “never install” flag. If you go to yast you can apply the block in the package or group
I routinely do zypper dup --no-recommends to avoid installing stuff that I don’t want, so that is a safe option.
patterns are most useful at install time and removing them after install does not prevent installed packages (and their dependencies) to be upgraded.
You may miss a new feature if, say, kde gets a major update that might add packages to add functionalities without dependencies from other installed packages.
All in all, I would let the patterns installed; they do no harm during dup --no-recommends and you can still occasionally do a plain zypper dup as a dry run and then manually install whatever new packages you might be interested in.
PS: as @Keyran17 wrote, zypper addlock <some packages>is another viable option.
Feeling reassured, I’ve done a ‘zypper dup --no-recommends’ and any subsequent, normal ‘zypper dup’ calls say there’s nothing to do, so I’m gonna leave the pattern-files alone as suggested and only worry about them if and when future updates do the same thing again.
I’ll do some more research into zypper’s locking features, but it doesn’t look like I need it for now.
Thanks again.
(I couldn’t see an edit-button on my first post that would allow me to change the thread-title to [SOLVED] - is there another SOP here that I should know about?)