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mathfeel

Member

Registered: 2010-05-08

Posts: 36

pacman dependency cleaning wants to remove xorg-server

After installing

pacman -S xorg

all the packages are still listed as not depended on by anything:

pacman -Qtdq
xf86-video-vesa
xorg-bdftopcf
xorg-font-util
xorg-fonts-100dpi
xorg-fonts-75dpi
xorg-iceauth
xorg-mkfontscale
xorg-server
xorg-server-devel
xorg-server-xnest
xorg-server-xvfb
xorg-sessreg
xorg-smproxy
xorg-x11perf
xorg-xbacklight
xorg-xcmsdb
xorg-xcursorgen
xorg-xdpyinfo
xorg-xdriinfo
xorg-xev
xorg-xgamma
xorg-xhost
xorg-xinput
xorg-xkbevd
xorg-xkbutils
xorg-xkill
xorg-xlsatoms
xorg-xlsclients
xorg-xmodmap
xorg-xpr
xorg-xrdb
xorg-xrefresh
xorg-xsetroot
xorg-xvinfo
xorg-xwayland
xorg-xwd
xorg-xwininfo
xorg-xwud

So, if I actually run

pacman -Rs

, xorg-server would get removed.

Can you explain what is going on?

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Cheers!

M

Xyne

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2008-08-03

Posts: 6,965

Website

Re: pacman dependency cleaning wants to remove xorg-server

"xorg" is a package group, not a metapackage like base. When you install "xorg", it's equivalent to individually installing all of the packages in the group. If those package were already installed implicitly then installing "xorg" will not change the install reason. Incidentally "base" used to be a group but it was only recently changed to an empty package that depends on the packages in the base group.

And what command are you actually running? pacman -Rs without any arguments is invalid. Even with an argument, it should not remove explicitly installed packages until you pass them as arguments to that command.

What's the output of pacman -Qi xorg-server?

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mathfeel

Member

Registered: 2010-05-08

Posts: 36

Re: pacman dependency cleaning wants to remove xorg-server

Got it: grouped package != meta package.

Sorry for the typo, I meant to say that when I run the result of the query as argument to

pacman -Rs

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Cheers!

M

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,082

Re: pacman dependency cleaning wants to remove xorg-server

-Rs removes all packages in the argument list including all their dependents that in turn are not required for anything not explicitly listed. Which matches that xorg-server for that list.

If your actual goal is removing unused orphans then that's described here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman … _(orphans)