showing dependency trees

[Björn Persson]

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

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