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I am trying to remove xfce and gnome, but pacman is trying to uninstall some packages that i installed explicitly, like xfce4-terminal.
I am using the -Rs option. Accord to the manual -s does :
-s,
Remove each target specified including all of their dependencies,
provided that (A) they are not required by other packages; and (B)
they were not explicitly installed by the user. This operation is
recursive and analogous to a backwards --sync operation, and it
helps keep a clean system without orphans. If you want to omit
condition (B), pass this option twice.
I think that it can occur with other packages, which is pretty dangerous.
Without the -s option for gnome :
sudo pacman -R gnome
checking dependencies...
error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
:: cheese: requires gnome-desktop
:: gtk3: requires adwaita-icon-theme
So, there is a safe way to unninstall a group package like xfce or gnome and his denpendencies without unninstalling the used and previous explicitly installed packages ?
Last edited by chiruLL (2015-08-01 13:33:11)
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Look at the man page some more (hint, you want to remove *unneeded* packages).
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i tried it. But for some reason pacman -Ru still trying to remove xfce4-terminal. I also tryed to reinstall xfce4-terminal just to make sure that it was marked as explicitly. Even with -Ru or -Rus pacman still trying to unninstall xfce4-terminal. I know i could just reinstall xfce4-terminal after, but i think i can have some surprises on future with same situations
$ pacman -Qe | grep xfce4-terminal
xfce4-terminal 0.6.3-2
sudo pacman -Ru(even with -s) xfce4
other xfce4 stuff ... xfce4-terminal-0.6.3-2 ...
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Most of xfce4 will be explicitly installed... "pacman -Sg xfce4" will show everything explicitly installed when you installed the xfce4 group. Pick the ones you don't want and remove them.
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So there is no way to keep the manually installed stand alone packages after unninstall a group ? I just realized that after i unninstalled cinnamon and gnome with -R, NetworkManager was unninstalled. Unninstalling a group with -Rsu will not take care of protect stand alone packages
There is no way to protect these stand alone packages ?(typing packages names from a group 1 by 1 will be longstanding, but i can do it if is the only way)
Last edited by chiruLL (2015-08-01 02:28:54)
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Those packages are part of the group, or installed as dependencies of packages in the group. How is pacman supposed to know that you want to remove a group, but not all of it?
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You can export the list of packages you want to keep and reinstall them after you remove the whole group.
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Other than removing them all and reinstalling, you could do the following - which would be more commands, but it would prevent your from ever being without a desired package installed:
pacman -D --asdeps xfce4
pacman -D --asexplicit xfce4-terminal # and NetworkManager etc
pacman -Ru xfce4
I think the confusion here is between groups and metapackages. A metapackage can be made that depends on everything in xfce. So when you install this single package 'xfce-meta' all of xfce is pulled in as a dependency. Then if you explicitly install one of those dependencies, then remove xfce-meta (with Rs) then all of the xcfe stuff *except* for those you explicitly installed will be removed. This sounds like what you expect to happen here - but groups are not metapackages.
With a xfce group (correct me if I'm wrong Allan) pacman 'sees' the group name xfce4 and essentially just expands that to the list of group members. So - at least functionally, after the prompt of which packages to install - there is no difference between the following two command:
pacman -S xfce4
pacman -S exo garcon gtk-xfce-engine thunar thunar-volman ...
By installing the group, you have explicitly installed all of the group members (or any that you selected from pacman's initial prompt). Later reinstalling xfce4-terminal explicitly changes nothing - it was already installed explicitly like all the other members of the group.
"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" - Richard Stallman
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