RPM takes most of the work out of removing software from your system,
and that's great. As with everything else in life, however, there's a
downside. RPM also makes it easy to erase packages that are critical to
your system's continued operation. Here are some examples of packages
not to erase:
RPM: RPM will happily uninstall itself. No problem — you'll
just re-install it with rpm -i… Oops!
Bash: The Bourne-again Shell may not be the shell you use, but
certain parts of many Linux systems (like the scripts executed
during system startup and shutdown) use
/bin/sh, which is a symbolic link to
/bin/bash. No
/bin/bash, no /bin/sh.
No /bin/sh, no system!
In many cases, RPM's dependency processing will prevent inadvertent
erasures from causing massive problems. However, if you're not sure,
use rpm -q to get more information about the package
you'd like to erase.
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