Good Morning, I have been cleaning up by desktop and removing applications that I do not use and one of them is pidgin, but when system updates come out I am still getting the recommended update for pidgin. I have checked my system and all of the files and directories for pidgin have been removed. What is my next step to prevent this update from reappearing?
Bryan
“SpaceMonkey”
openSUSE 42.1
You said you “removed” it. But that is a general English term. What did you exactly do to remove it?
HCVV,
Let me correct myself I used used Yast and unistall pidgin. Then I used this command in a terminal to search for files associated with pidgin. No files were follow.
Zypper search pidgin
Hm, I assume you mean
zypper search pidgin
and not
Zypper search pidgin
That command does not search for files on your system. It searches for packages with the string pidgin in their name, in the repos your system is scubsribed to.
Do you mean with “when system updates come out”, that you do a YaST > Software > Online update and that the pidgin packet is in the list of Security or in the list of Recommended Updates?
Or that you do a
zypper patch
and that the pidgin package is in the list?
Yes I used
zypper search pidgin
Thank you for clarifying the search feature, but the results that have an * indicates what package is installed. The package updates show up as notifications and pidgin is alsaus included.*
You get the CODE tags by clicking on the # button in the tool bar of the posty editor. 
You mean you have nowhere an i (indicating “installed”) in the first colums (headed with S). Ok , that means you realy de-installed it.
I still have no indication which tool shows you this. I suggested YaST > Software > Online Update and zypper patch, but you did not tell where you see this.
You seem to think that everybody has the same system as you have, use it in the same way as you do and thus will understand immediatly all the details when you only give some raw information. This is not the case.
You can always do as root a
zypper patch
check if it mentions any pidgin in what it is going to patch, when not say y to it. else say n, post the whole thing (prompt, command, output, next prompt) here for investigation.*
Henke asked you what exactly you did to uninstall pidgin, but your reply remained a little “generic”. My guess is that you did not remove all the associated libraries, plugins, etc that require pidgin as a dependency.
Below is the output from the
zypper patch
command
bryan@FamilyDesktop:~> sudo zypper patch
root's password:
Loading repository data...
Reading installed packages...
Resolving package dependencies...
The following 2 NEW packages are going to be installed:
libpurple-lang libpurple-tcl
The following NEW patch is going to be installed:
openSUSE-2016-1136
The following package is going to be upgraded:
libpurple
1 package to upgrade, 2 new.
Overall download size: 4.4 MiB. Already cached: 0 B. After the operation,
additional 20.8 MiB will be used.
Continue? [y/n/? shows all options] (y):
Forgive me for providing generic answers earlier. I was responding with from my phone and having to write responses from memory. In an attempt to clarify when I log on to my desktop a I receive a notification on my desktop to let me know if any updates are available. On occasion I will run
zypper update
but only as I feel the need to manually update my system. Is this automatic notification not a part of every openSUSE 42.1 OS? That is why I thought the update process was easy to understand. With the patches above I presses Y to have them applied. If my question needs further explanation please let me know.
Bryan
libpurple-lang - Languages for package pidgin
Provides translations to the package pidgin
libpurple-tcl - TCL Plugin Support for Pidgin
TCL plugin loader for Pidgin. This package will allow you to write or use Pidgin plugins written in the TCL programming language.
So they may have been drawn in when you installed pidgin and are still there. IMHO you can de-install them both.
This illustrates that undoing the installation of some software package is not trivial. When you made no notes about the dependent packages that where installed with it (YaST tells you that), you are on your own.
That brings us to the point why you want to de-install pidgin. Software that is installed, but not used is only using a very tiny amount of disk space.
And about those notifications where you seem not to know where they are from. There are indeed desktops (but you never told us which one you use) that feature an update applet based on Packagekit. But many peeple dot not use that. I, for example, have Packagekit not installed. And your experience strengthens me in that policy.
Again. never assume people do the same and use the same in the same manner as you do. This is Linux. Linux is about choice. Choice of desktop, choice of tool, choice of way to use the tools.
Please take asking here as a serious matter. People here are for the most very willling to give some of there free time to help others. But they hope that time is spend efficient, not by asking for all the obvious details, but concentrating on the real problem. I know the learning curve in Linux is steep, but sitting down, and taking the time to gather information from your system in a post that has a logical step by step approach with evidence and not your conclusions alone (some of your conclusions above were outright wrong, weren’t they?;)) will make a good problem description.
And never forget, a good problem description contains three things, either point by point, or otherwise in the way it is formulated:
Another help on asking in the internet is here (it is not 100% applicable to the openSUSE forums, but has some very good points): http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
I did a test install of pidgin and it drew in about 10 other packages which remained when I subsequently removed pidgin. this was all using YaST Software Management. Then I re-installed pidgin. Exited and re-entered SW Manager. Selected Dependencies → Clean Up. Selected pidgin for deletion, which offered to delete all the superfluous packages.
Nice test. Thanks for reporting.
I doubt however if it always works. You could have installed some other package in the meantime, that also needs one of the added ones as a dependency. I trust that a warning will be displayed then. In any case it is something to keep in mind and try in such a situation.
eng-int,
Thank you for your test and explanation. That helps me a lot.
HCVV,
You are correct my first posts were missing a lot of information. Normally I am better about providing problem descriptions and my troubleshooting steps. The ability to make my own choices with my system is what I enjoy about Linux. I have been using Linux as my primary OS since 2009 but I am still learning and studying. I do appreciate the Linux community and their willingness to help others. As far as updates are concerned I have always used the default application that pulls the updates from the repositories. In all of my reading and research I have not heard that I could uninstall my Package Kit. So correct me if I am wrong but with the Package kit uninstalled I would be responsible for updating my system. Which would mean I only install the updates that I need. The whole reason I uninstalled pidgin was that I wanted to stop seeing the update show up for an application that I do not use. Thank you again for helping me and more so providing me with quality knowledge that I will use in the future.
Bryan
Your are welcome.
Many people seem to be happy with Packagekit and the update notification applications that e.g. KDE provides. But sometimes it seems that Packagekit (that wants to be a generalized interface to the different software management systems around, like zypper and others on other distributions) is doing things wrong. Not to strange when one realizes that zypper (and YaST Software Management), based on zypplib, is already settled and stable software for years, where Packagekit is only a few years old.
Personaly:
Thus I de-installed Packagekit and the notification tool (Apper in 13.1, but again something different in Leap). But this is a personal approach, like so many other approaches by other people.