Thank you for the quick response. Your argument makes logical sense.
In practice, on a Debian Bullseye system, there are unfortunately many packages which fail to declare the needed dependency. I guess in theory it would be possible to reverse the logic and ask: why should a file manager know what kind of icons it will be asked to display? A hard dependency on an svg rendering library makes as little sense at that end. So where should it be declared? But anyway, until there's some kind of framework to connect providers and consumers, a Recommends: from papirus-icon-theme will help, and someone assembling a desktop from scratch can add librsvg2-common to the default install list. Best wishes, John
