If you want to clean up existing orphaned dependencies, then package-cleanup is your friend (from yum-utils).

Take a look at all the packages that are orphaned, and make sure it is sane.

package-cleanup --leaves


If you’re happy with the list, you can just remove them all (after you’ve enabled yum’s new autoremove feature, of course!):

yum erase $(package-cleanup --leaves)


You can instantly see the benefit of this new feature – on my machine this command also removes brand new orphaned dependencies, created by the orphans I’m removing! That’s 59 packages in total.