This is partially an academic question but partially practical as well. I’m trying to “slim down” my KDE install and I want to check why certain packages are installed so that I make sure that I’m not removing something that may provide additional functionality. I’ve hit a dead end with two packages, akonadi-server and kaccounts-integration. I do understand what these packages are, but from a package management perspective I cannot figure out what requires/recommends them that caused them to be installed. I installed Tumbleweed and removed some packages from the default KDE install (akregator, kaddressbook, kmail, kontact, konversation, kopete, korganizer, plasma5-pk-updates). I know that kaccounts-integration is its own application, so it would not tie into this, but I thought that I removed everything that should rely on akonadi.
I’ve taken a few steps to try to trace this back. First, I checked what would be removed if I ran
zypper rm --clean-deps (package name)
. I then checked the install status for all of the packages that would be removed and they were all (including akonadi-server and kaccounts-integration themselves) installed automatically. I then tried to trace the package requirements with
zypper se --requires --recommends --suggests
on each of the packages, but I end up stuck in a loop where they all just seem to recommend or require themselves and no other packages.
Any suggestions as to further steps to determine what requires or recommends these packages? I think it may be something related to patterns but I haven’t been able to find a pattern that would install those packages.
I would just go into Yast software management. And then mark the package to be removed.
I would expect a “conflict resolution” window to pop up, telling me everything else that it wants to remove. I can make experimental choices there, and see what else pops up. And I can abort the whole session without actually changing anything.
You will probably find that akonadi is integrated into KDE in a way that it cannot be easily removed.
Remove the KDE/plasma related pattern packages. But, I don’t understand the reasoning. Why would you want to remove packages that you ( in the installer ) chose to install? Who/what are these packages hurting / interfering with?
That’s what I expected, but I can remove akonadi-server without any other packages being removed. It concerns me though because even if I re-install kmail, which I know uses akonadi for storage, I can remove akonadi-server without it prompting me to remove kmail.
kaccounts-integration-lang isn’t installed… The only reverse dependencies I can find (by using zypper se --requires --recommends --suggests) are kaccounts-integration-lang, which is not installed, and libkaccounts1, which is installed automatically but is not required by any packages I have installed.
That’s the problem, to my knowledge I did not choose to install them and I’m trying to figure out what other package I selected that caused them to be installed. If I remove the kde and kde_plasma patterns and the akonadi-server package, then do a zypper dup, the system wants to install akonadi-server again.
And honestly, if I can’t figure it out I’ll just leave them, but I’d like to know how to find out why a given package was installed…
Thank you, but I do know how I could remove akonadi if I decided to. My question is really what I had in the original post: I’d like to figure out why it’s installed (what pattern or package caused it to be automatically installed) before I decide if I want to remove it.