Install packages with just what is needed

Michael Schwendt mschwendt at gmail.com
Sat Nov 28 15:24:46 UTC 2015


On Sat, 28 Nov 2015 09:07:57 -0600, anlarye wrote:

> ​Is there a way to install a package with just the bare minimum required
> packages?

You may want to learn about runtime requirements and RPM package dependencies
before starting a topic with such a question.

> I am running a XFCE spin of Fedora 23. I wanted to install kvirc on the
> box. But when I go through dnf install kvirc, the list ends up being about
> 38 additional packages. I doubt that all of them are needed for kvirc to
> run.
> 
> So how do I get kvirc and just what it needs in order to work properly?

What does it need?
How do you tell?

Let's take a brief look at the packages:

  Information for RPM kvirc-4.2.0-16.fc23.x86_64.rpm
  http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/rpminfo?rpmID=6418864

Scroll a bit down to the column (at the left side) which says "Requires".
Almost all of those are automatic dependencies on shared libraries required
at runtime. The package tools find the packages which provide those "things"
the kvirc package requires. Look at the package source file:

  http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/kvirc.git/plain/kvirc.spec

It adds no manual dependencies. There are no "explicit Requires" tags in the
spec file except for a conditional line to require a minimum version of KDE 4.

So, which dependencies do you think are _not_ needed?
Perhaps you have in mind libraries, which may be searched for at runtime and would
be linked with only when the program wants to call out to the library interface
actually?


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