Hi, On Sun, Nov 30, 2025 at 03:11:04PM -0500, The Wanderer wrote: > What the reasoning is I couldn't say beyond that (I'd have to do some > digging), but it's likely the same basic chain will apply.
Yeah. It's just the way any binary Linux distribution works. If you want package 'a' to be able to optionally use features from library packages 'libfoo' and 'libbar' then you'll need to either: a) link against the libraries you want and not against the libraries you don't, or; b) arrange inside package 'a' to have dynamic runtime loading of libfoo and libbar based on configuration or probing or something, i.e. a plugin architecture, message passing between separate sub-systems, and so on. Linux distributions that distribute binary packages can only be quite blunt with choice (a) because if the packager decides to not link to libbar then no end user can ever use the features of libbar. So package 'a' gets linked against both libfoo and libbar, and even people who will never use the features of libbar get libbar installed. A similar kerfuffle happens with people who are so upset that the word "systemd" appears in any package on their system that they want to remove all such packages, then they find that a bunch of stuff links against libsystemd purely to do a check to see if systemd is in use or not. Bottom line is that complex packages will often link to libraries the user will never use, and that doesn't imply that their use is being forced upon anyone. They might even do that to check that use is NOT appropriate. $ apt-cache depends --recurse xserver-xorg-core | grep -c wayland 605 At this point our banned (?) friend might pop up and say everyone should be using Arch or Gentoo or something. 😀 Thanks, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
