Work around for unnecessary dependencies

u_no_hu · 2008-12-25 12:24:24

Today while i was doing a clean up of my system, i found that smbclient was installed as a dependency of VLC player. My system is stand alone and as such i dont have much use for that 41Mb dependency if my understanding is not wrong.
Similarly i noticed that hal in testing is dependent upon console kit , package kit etc which i am not sure whether i need or not. Lots of such dependencies which should actually be optional dependencies but are actually installed by default ....

So is there any way i can skip installing these things(apart from creating a package of myown, which will be a pain in the ass to update).

SamC · 2008-12-25 15:02:31

You can use

pacman -Rd package

but it probably isn't recommended.

Last edited by SamC (2008-12-25 15:03:04)

Runiq · 2008-12-25 16:14:47

u_no_hu wrote:

So is there any way i can skip installing these things(...)?

That's what the ABS is for - if you don't like the precompiled packages, just compile them for yourself. In a nutshell, you copy the package from your local ABS tree to another directory (for vlc the dir is /var/abs/extra/vlc, for hal it's /var/abs/testing/hal) and run makepkg -o. By tweaking the configure options (usually in the src/<pkgname>/ directory), you can manually adjust which functions you want to compile into the program. When you've done that, you can remove the things you don't need from the "depends" line, makepkg -e, and voilà, get a package without unnecessary dependencies. The package can then be installed using pacman -U <pkgname>.

Updating's pretty easy too, as you usually just need to up the pkgver variable in the package's PKGBUILD and recompile. You might want to add your self-compiled package to the IgnorePkg line in pacman.conf so it isn't overwritten with the standard precompiled package everytime you run -Syu.

Last edited by Runiq (2008-12-25 16:35:44)

u_no_hu · 2008-12-30 07:18:34

@Runiq
I meant apart from AUR/ABS.... thats why i wrote

(apart from creating a package of myown, which will be a pain in the ass to update)

in my initial post.
Anyway thanks for your comment.

Last edited by u_no_hu (2008-12-30 07:19:21)

Arch Linux

#1 2008-12-25 12:24:24

Work around for unnecessary dependencies

#2 2008-12-25 15:02:31

Re: Work around for unnecessary dependencies

#3 2008-12-25 16:14:47

Re: Work around for unnecessary dependencies

#4 2008-12-30 07:18:34

Re: Work around for unnecessary dependencies

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