[Fedora-livecd-list] Learning why packages are getting installed

[Matthias Clasen]

This weekend I spent some time trying to get a better understanding of
why some packages are included on the live cd. At first I tried to
generate a full dependency graph for the package set on the live cd, 
but the graph visualization tools I tried couldn't handle a graph of
this size gracefully. 

Therefore I took a slightly different approach and wrote a small tool
called "why", that when given a package name, produces a partial
dependency graph showing how the given package is pulled in by
"leaf" packages. 

The tool and some example graphs can be found here:

http://people.redhat.com/mclasen/livecd

(the green node is the package thats investigated, the red nodes are the
leaf packages)

I couldn't get myself to learn how to convince librpm to give me the
dependency graph, thus the tool reads it from a text file named alldeps.
The above location has the alldeps file that I generated for the test4
live cd.

Hope this is useful for somebody,

Matthias