showing dependency trees

[Michael Schwendt]

On Mon, 24 Aug 2009 23:26:58 +0200, Björn wrote:

> 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.

Installing ktorrent pulls in Akonadi, which is a PIM storage service,
which in turn wants qt-mysql. It might be that ktorrent even includes PIM
functionality. More unexpected was to see that it drags in a display
manager and KDE base packages to offer KDE sessions at X gdm login.