Posting here as there doesn't seem to be an active Arch Linux community.

I noticed while updating my system today that I have a bunch of qemu packages I don't recall installing. So I took a look at why they were there and found this:

Name            : qemu-base
Required By     : qemu-desktop
Install Reason  : Installed as a dependency for another package

Name            : qemu-desktop
Required By     : None
Optional For    : qemu-base
Install Reason  : Installed as a dependency for another package

It seems like qemu-desktop was a dependency for something I later removed and pulled in qemu-base. However, because of the dependency cycle, they aren't showing up as orphans and has just been hanging around in my system along with 150mb of other dependencies.

Correct?

  • infeeeee@lemm.ee
    ·
    25 days ago

    Posting here as there doesn’t seem to be an active Arch Linux community.

    archlinux@lemmy.ml seems active to m

    Your text says qemu-desktop is only "optional" for qemu-base. You can safely remove qemu-desktop, pacman won't nag about optional dependencies.

    For checking dependencies, I like to use pactree, it draws nice graphs in the terminal: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman#Pactree

    • Mactan@lemmy.ml
      ·
      24 days ago

      I learned some irritating lessons uninstalling everything from that list a few times. one of these days I'll go through and set --asdeps so I remember why they're installed