showing dependency trees

[Seth Vidal]

On Mon, 24 Aug 2009, Björn Persson wrote:

>>
>> 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.

So by 'unnecessary' you don't mean not required by the pkg's dependencies. 
you mean something else entirely.

okay, that's fine - take that up with the pkg maintainer(s).

-sv