GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 710343
Software does not indicate that dependencies will be removed when an 'application' is removed
Last modified: 2013-12-20 04:03:42 UTC
When a given 'application' has dependencies, Software 3.10.1 will happily remove both it and them without giving you any indication. For e.g., authconfig-gtk is considered an 'app' and listed in Software (as 'Authentication'). firstboot depends on it (yes, it's an obsolete package, but this is just for illustrative purposes). Removing 'Authentication' with Software pops up a generic warning that you'll have to install it again if you want to use it, but no indication at all that removing it will *also* cause firstboot to be removed. I suspect there'll always be some reason why something with deps will show up in Software's list, unless you simply force it never to display any package on which any other package depends and make that really robust...so you'd either have to do that, or handle displaying dependencies somehow.
The designs don't have any UI for dealing with dependencies. I think applications are supposed to be removable without taking out other core bits of the OS. In this case, I think blacklisting authconfig-gtk is probably the way to go.
I don't think blacklisting individual packages that I find, one at a time, is a sane way to go at all. It's about the exact opposite of sane, in fact. As I said: it seems far more sane to either write some kind of big hammer blacklist which definitely prevents any non-leaf package from ever showing up in Software, or write some code to handle dependencies. authconfig-gtk was just the first one I happened to spot in the list and think 'hmm, I bet that has dependencies'. I'll bet dollars to donuts there are more.
Bug #711171 has more discussion *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 711171 ***