Rahul Sundaram wrote:
A quick way to actually check for such dependencies is to switch to
another desktop environment, say Xfce, remove all the KDE packages and
install one of the KDE apps. It usually reveals dependencies which
are rather silly. I have seen kde-settings, background packages and
kdebase pull in odd dependencies on occasions. k3b, ktorrent, scribus
et all are often used outside KDE.
It's not like those dependencies bite. ;-) HDD space is cheap.
I don't find it scandalous that ktorrent drags in kdebase-workspace
nor that kdebase- workspace drags in Akonadi (and thus MySQL, which
is a hard requirement of Akonadi) and I'm not sure the current
subpackage explosion (FYI, rdieter split out subpackages to break
both the links in the offending chain: in upcoming updates, ktorrent
no longer requires kdebase-workspace, only the kde-plasma-ktorrent
subpackage does, and kdebase-workspace no longer requires akonadi,
only the kdebase-workspace-akonadi subpackage does) are a step in the
right direction (as they mean the default installations of both
ktorrent and kdebase-workspace/Plasma will be missing features). I'd
rather have "unneccessary" dependencies than useful features not
installed by default.