cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21673875

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?

  • UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world
    0·
    14 days ago

    That is mostly correct, although this is not a true cycle, since you can find packages that are strictly optional depencies, i.e. not a hard requirement for anything.

  • Kajika@lemmy.ml
    0·
    14 days ago

    I don’t see any cycle here, qemu-deskyop needs qemu-base and that’s it.

    I think you meant that qemu-desktop is orphan.