Hello Radka,
Radka Janekova [2017-10-17 3:20 +0200]:
so recently I managed to destroy[1] two production servers by
removing what
I saw as useless web-config utility. Apparently Cockpit depends on
NetworkManager, which nobody would expect and is easily overlooked.
I guess what happened is that you (or the OS installer) installed the "cockpit"
metapackage, which recommends cockpit-networkmanager, which depends on
NetworkManager. Thus the latter was only installed as an automatic dependency,
not as a "top-level" requested package. Removing cockpit would then also
uninstall any automatic dependency, including NetworkManager.
It seems a bit strange though that you actually depend on NM without having
installed it explicitly. You can run "dnf mark install NetworkManager" to
promote its status from "automatic dependency" to "explicitly
requested".
So this at least explains what happened, not necessarily how to fix it. But
this is more a problem in the installer direction than in the package
dependencies.
Martin