Everything depends on gstreamer!

**SpecChum** · June 24th, 2013

I’ve just installed and configured a minimal KDE distro based on the Ubuntu 13.04 minimal CD. It’s working really well but I have 1 gripe with it.

After installing kde-plasma-desktop gstreamer was automatically downloaded as the phonon backend, which as fine as I’d just replace it with my usual vlc backend and remove phonon-backend-gstreamer.

So I remove phonon-backend-gstreamer, which gets removed as expected, and I’ve now got autoremove correctly advising me that some gstreamer-* libs are now not required; normal behaviour. But…autoremove is also recommending that it removes Linux-sound-base, alsa-base etc, some were also included that seemed unrelated to me, such as libsoup.

Now I know this is not a major issue, as I don’t _have_ to run autoremove, but it’s just bugging me why this is happening.

Why has a gstreamer backend got such a massive dependency list?

**dino99** · June 24th, 2013

you might ask devs why they are doing cross dependencies everywhere (askubuntu)

**SpecChum** · June 24th, 2013

Good plan.

Done.

**mc4man** · June 24th, 2013

Originally Posted by SpecChum

Why has a gstreamer backend got such a massive dependency list?

It really doesn't have very many dependencies
More a result of how you did your install, minimal + adding..

autoremove just looks for packages marked as automatically installed that have no current packages installed that depend on them
(I'd gather that a typical 'full' kubuntu install would have kubuntu-desktop installed which would depend on alsa-base

Code:

apt-cache rdepends alsa-base
alsa-base
Reverse Depends:
  gstreamer1.0-alsa
  xubuntu-desktop
  volumeicon-alsa
  ubuntustudio-desktop
  ubuntu-touch
  ubuntu-gnome-desktop
  lubuntu-core
  kubuntu-desktop
  kubuntu-active
  initramfs-tools-tcos
  flite
  ubuntu-desktop
  linux-sound-base
  libflite1
  gstreamer1.0-alsa
  gstreamer0.10-alsa
  alsa-utils

libsoup is used by gnome apps, unity, ect (gnome desktop), run an apt-cache rdepends on.
(apt-cache rdepends libsoup2.4-1

Any packages you believe shouldn't be in the autoremove list just mark as manually installed