It's been quite some time (almost two years) since my previous "release" of debtree, but now version 0.7.3 is available. And it still generates very nice graphs

The changes are relatively minor: a few nice fixes for corner cases that were not handled correctly, and an update of the default lists of "skip" and "end" packages which help to limit the size of graphs for a fair number of packages I tried (including konqueror and openoffice.org).

Reason to revisit debtree was a recent nice mail from a debtree user, but also the current discussions about udev and the FHS. I'm on the side of "let's please keep /usr mountable separately". Mostly because I like a (small) encrypted root with a separate (large) unencrypted `/usr'.

I'm also increasingly unhappy with the default size of Debian's desktop installs, especially now that it looks as if Squeeze will see installation of Recommends by default by tasksel (and thus Debian Installer).

For comparison, the size of a default Gnome desktop install for Etch was 1360MB; for Lenny it is 1830MB; for Squeeze it looks like it will be well over 3000MB! Remember that for Sarge we installed both Gnome and KDE from CD1 with both together taking 1390MB?

Sure, some of that is real functionality, but a lot is also (IMO) redundant visual effects that only serve to slow the desktop down and junk needed to do stuff automagically. And a heck of a lot is duplicated functionality. One of the main reasons I switched to Linux was because it gave me back control over my systems, but with KDE4 and pervasive stuff like hal and all the various "kits" Linux is on a fast track that's giving priority to flashiness over real functionality and eroding that control.

Here's a fairly default dependency graph for hal (click for full image). Looks reasonable, right?

But that's only because most major dependencies, such as dbus, policykit and pm-utils have been pruned. Here's a complete graph, with only libc6 omitted (full image is 1.5MB). Truly a tangled web. Scary.

One can also look at it from the other side. Today I upgraded my sid chroot and found I suddenly needed to install libavahi-client3, libavahi-common3, libavahi-common-data and libdbus-1-3. Why? Reason turned out to be libcups2, so I checked if I really needed that. And here's why I do.

Most of these dependencies of libgtk2.0-0 I can understand, but isn't gtk supposed to be a graphical toolkit library? Couldn't printing support be implemented in some more specialized Gnome printing toolkit library? But I'm probably missing something.

Anyway, now that I have a bit more perl experience through my recent work on debmirror, maybe I should finally port debtree from shell script to perl...

See the debtree home page for a full overview of how to read the graphs, but here's a quick intro. Purple arrows are Pre-Depends, blue are Depends and black are Recommends; green connections show Provides. The green packages are currently installed in my sid chroot, while the white ones are not. The diamonds show where the graph has been pruned: dependencies for these packages are not shown.