Arch Linux

lucianon

Member

Registered: 2020-11-24

Posts: 3

Removing unused dependencies

For the last 10 years I’ve been running my laptops with a very minimal installation of Arch that has only the packages necessary for running virtual machines with vbox. The virtualbox package depends on qt5-base and some other packages because of the QT client, but I don’t want to install those dependencies because they bring up lots of other unnecessary packages, and I don’t need QT because I only use VBoxSDL (the binary VirtuslBox uses QT but I never use that binary).

My question is, what options do I have to install virtualbox and exclude the dependencies I don’t need? One option I’m considering is downloading the virtualbox package, unpack it, remove the dependencies from .PKGINFO and the VirtualBox binary, repack it and install the new version from the local file system. Another option might be creating some fake qt5-base package in order to satisfy the dependency without installing anything. What else could I do?

I wouldn’t want to compile virtualbox myself because I’d have to install even more packages in order to do that, or I would have to setup a vm for builds... but I hope anyone gives me a better solution,

Also, couldn’t we just make those dependencies optional in the virtualbox package? Should I talk with the maintainer?

Thanks!

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,738

Re: Removing unused dependencies

Pretty much the ones you listed, and...

--assume-installed <package=version>
           Add a virtual package "package" with version "version" to the transaction to
           satisfy dependencies. This allows to disable specific dependency checks without
           affecting all dependency checks. To disable all dependency checking, see the
           --nodeps option.

Last edited by V1del (2020-11-24 15:56:56)

lucianon

Member

Registered: 2020-11-24

Posts: 3

Re: Removing unused dependencies

Thanks a lot, I didn’t know —assume-installed, I ended up doing this. I also added the unwanted dependencies to IgnorePkg in /etc/pacman.conf to make sure the packages will not be reintroduced (e.g., during update).