[Slackbuilds-users] Very simple way of finding dependency

[Didier Spaier]

Le 13/09/2017 à 16:29, Didier Spaier a écrit :
> Le 13/09/2017 à 12:40, Sebastian Arcus a écrit :
>> I know SBo and Slackware doesn't have a system in place to track
>> dependencies - and most of the time that suits me just fine. However,
>> on occasion, I stumble over a piece of SBo software installed on my
>> machine - such as a library, and I would like to know why is it there
>> - which package needs it. I was thinking that, if when using the
>> search field on SBo website, it would also search through the .info
>> and README files of packages, I could easily get a list of packages
>> which depend on or use the library - and spot if one of them is
>> something that I use or have installed. It would be crude, but I think
>>  it would work.
> 
> Why bother? Just leave this package alone, or if you are really curious,
> remove it and see what happens.
> 
> Also, if you upgrade a package, it is possible that it doesn't need a
> dependency any more.
> 
> Furthermore, as others have said, you would need to check the optional
> dependencies.
> 
> In my opinion the gain in disk space removing a package is not often
> worth the time you will spend to find out if you can safely remove it,
> unless you always keep notes of why you installed a package, but even
> then, you could install another package that needs it later, without
> paying attention. 
> 
> This doesn't apply to leaf packages, of course.

I forgot: but if you remove a package you can easily spot some deps with
'ls -ltr /var/log/packages' as they were installed just before.
Then, you can probably safely remove the deps *if* recently installed.