Hi


On Mon, Jun 16, 2014 at 8:45 AM, Jan Zelený  wrote:
ad b) how many times have this feature actually saved you from erasing the
kernel? In 10+ years using Linux I have never managed to do this accidentally.

You are assuming limited by your own experience that this is done accidentally.  On the contrary, because of yum's behavior, its perfectly fine to quickly do a yum remove kernel to get rid of older kernels and retain the current one. I do this from time to time if I have to play around with third party kernel modules and don't want the other kernels interfering with that process.  The protected packages feature in general is also useful not because anyone would do yum remove glibc directly but because other scripts that remove duplicate packages have been known to have bugs in the past which removed the critical packages instead and the protected packages feature would prevent such bugs from causing irrecoverable damage.

Rahul