Hi Marc, On Mon, 20 Apr 2020, at 14:05, Marc Espie wrote: > Actually, not having recursive depends easily available on an installed > package base is somewhat tedu-ish. > > Most specifically, it's not very useful for anything in common usage. What > would you want it for ?... sure it's nice information, but in practice, > unused dependencies from former ports get gc'd with pkg_delete -a...
The use case was that I was installing Vim and it has a few variants. In the past I discovered that using no_x11 means that Vim does not automatically interface with the X11 clipboards. Makes sense but as I only use Vim in the terminal I do not need the GUI. Still, using packages is more convenient than compiling it myself so the question arose which variant has the least impact on my system and still gets me the X11 clipboard features that I desire? Of course, you may counter that using the dry switch (-n) covers off this scenario. You can run it against each variant and see which one brings in the fewest dependencies. Going back to the Vim example, I thought I could reduce it down to installing a variant with either gtk+2 or gtk+3. Through my research I was surprised to discover that Firefox, which I use, has front ends for both toolkits. That discovery made the choice fairly irrelevant but the insight was useful for me. I thought such discoveries would be generally useful to others as well. > Once you understand, show-reverse-deps, it's fairly easy to write > customized stuff that does similar things. I will consider this in the future. > BTW, any supplementary tool that does similar things directly in shell > has exactly zero chance to be included in the distribution. Acknowledged. I put it out there for those that might find it useful but was not expecting it to be included. > The offical parser for PackingList *is* the perl code, dependency handling > as well. > > Anything else is very likely to miss special cases and break atrociously. As I am sure is the case in my shell scripting :) Would a patch for such a feature, if it were using the proper Perl machinery, be considered? Or is this something that you absolutely do not wish to included at this time? -- Chris Rawnsley
