I am currently trying to deploy Fedora 35 with GNOME onto a few workstations. These machines will not have any relationship with parental control, and I am trying to remove the malcontent package to minimize the surface.
However, this package cannot be removed directly using dnf, as its dependency has been set to gnome-control-center, which is in turn the dependency of gnome-shell. Thus, it becomes impossible to remove this package individually without rpm --nodep, which does not prevent it from installing back whenever an update of gnome-shell lands. Nor will it be possible to block install via exluding from dnf.conf.
I researched a bit into them and cannot find a reason why the dependency relationship is being set like this. Is this something intentional or just wrong interpretation? I would say that the better way to manage it shall be making it a weak dependency to gnome-software.
If my knowledge is correct, what your command shows is that the malcontent package depends onpolkit, not the other way around. To inquire the packages which requiresmalcontent, you should use the following command:
I have been looking at a few other distros for their dependency relationship on malcontent, and it seems that none of them takes it as dependency of gnome-control-center. It is kinda meaningless to me that this thing is forced as a hard requirement of gnome-shell. On the other hand, removing it with rpm --nodep does not cause any issue currently.
I guess, one could think of malcontent as an optional dependency, but in this case, the maintainers clearly feel that it is an important enough feature/function to be treated as a necessary dependency. Maintainers (and developers) have to choose defaults, and sometimes defaults may not work for every use case. You can discuss this with the maintainers directly by filing a bug, or you could speak to the workstation SIG. They discussed its inclusion here, for example:
The thing here is: it seems that the gnome-control-center is not explicitly using this malcontent. This dependency relationship looks a bit weird on my side, and I shall fill a bug ticket later to discuss about it.