[arch] Redundant depencies

[Simo Leone]

On Sun, Jan 07, 2007 at 12:31:16AM -0500, Mister Dobalina wrote:
> Rainy day here, so for a little project I wrote some
> code to check the dependency tree in ABS for circular
> or redundant dependencies. By redundant dependency I
> mean a situation like:
> 
> X depends on Y and Z but Y also depends on Z so Z is
> redundant as a dependency for X.
> 
> Out of 2520 packages in ABS when I ran the program:
> 
> 0 packages with circular dependencies found :)
> 525 packages with redundant dependencies found (21%)
> with a total of 837 redundancies.
> 
> 
> Obviously many of these redundant dep situations
> shouldn't be touched, since if for some reason Y
> *stops* depending on Z that might break X. A lot of
> them are actually packages with gcc or glibc in their
> depends for no particular reason (I don't know how
> anyone could have an Arch system *without* glibc?)
> 
> Anyways, just thought I'd pass this info along if
> anyone is interested. Full list of redundant
> dependencies is here:
> 
> http://www.istop.com/~r6dh7/depcheck/dep.report.bz2
> 
Cool! One thing that might be worth mentioning in this situation, is
that when a package depends on something in the Base group (such as
glibc, gcc, bash... etc), it's generally assumed that the package is
installed and thus for the majority of packages, these deps are not
specified. In some cases, they have been... just because someone felt
like it, but they can be considered redundant in any case (except
perhaps for deps between packages in Base).

-- 
Simo Leone
Arch Linux Developer
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