Arch Linux

papadante

Member

Registered: 2018-09-12

Posts: 2

Removing dependencies without removing optionals of other packages.

When removing packages along with their dependencies with pacman -Rs, the dependencies are not removed if they are a required dependency of another package. But if they are just an optional dependency of another package, they are also removed. For instance, removing Evince reader also removes dependencies djvulibre, libgxps, libspectre which are optional dependencies to Xreader that provides extra functionality. So, is it possible to remove the dependencies along with a package without removing the dependencies if they are an optional as well as required dependency of another package?

eschwartz

Fellow

Registered: 2014-08-08

Posts: 4,097

Re: Removing dependencies without removing optionals of other packages.

No, and this is something that pacman's optdepends handling could use some improvement with. Currently it doesn't really factor into dependency parsing in all sorts of useful, practical ways...

Of course using pacman -D you can make those explicitly installed, or simply reinstall them again.

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Managing AUR repos The Right Way -- aurpublish (now a standalone tool)

Omar007

Member

Registered: 2015-04-09

Posts: 368

Re: Removing dependencies without removing optionals of other packages.

Maybe it would be OK to put up a feature request for this?

When I originally started using Arch I had honestly imagined it would've worked something like this:
Remove unused dependencies only

pacman -Rs

Remove unused and opt-dependencies (i.o.w.; as it works now with -Rs)

pacman -Rss

But it turned out to not work that way. Maybe it should? Never really gave it another thought honestly ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Last edited by Omar007 (2018-09-12 20:57:24)

papadante

Member

Registered: 2018-09-12

Posts: 2

Re: Removing dependencies without removing optionals of other packages.

Ok, thanks anyway.