Why not use a counter ? When a package is installed it increments the counters of the packages it depends on. Deleting a package also decrements the counters of the others. If a counter gets zero it can safely be deleted.
>> There is one other 'association' issue that is getting worse. Imagine >> selecting the gnome package suite. When I did this recently, I ended up >> with more than *30* packages being selected for gnome support. Now >> suppose the user wants to remove gnome to try out KDE, for example (lets >> just assume they are mutually exclusive). There is no reasonable way >> for this user to figure out which installed packages were installed for >> gnome. I guess what I'm suggesting is that the packages need to >> 'remember' *why* they were selected, by the user, or auto-selected >> because of dependency requirements on a given package. When the user >> goes to delete gnome from his system, the other packages that were >> installed only because of dependencies, can 'inform' the user, somehow, >> that they are no longer needed. > >An option for showing only those packages that nothing depends on >could be useful. Or a flag for every installed package showing if >there is dependencies. > Larry de Graaf