Seth Vidal wrote:
On Sun, 23 Aug 2009, Björn Persson wrote:
> I want to check whether a package drags in other packages
> unnecessarily.
define "unnecessarily"?
When you're forced to install package A to be able to install package E even
though E doesn't use any of the functionality that A provides.
For example, Michael Schwendt demonstrated that ktorrent pulls in qt-mysql,
which in turn depends on mysql-libs. That's OK if Ktorrent can actually do
something that results in queries to a MySQL database. Otherwise it drags in
the MySQL client libraries unnecessarily – that is, I should be allowed to
install Ktorrent without installing the MySQL client libraries.
One likely cause is that package C, somewhere in the dependency chain between
A and E, contains too many different functions. In that case C should probably
be split into subpackages C1 and C2, where C1 depends on A but E depends on
C2. Then E would no longer depend on A.
Björn Persson