Everything depends on gstreamer!

[SpecChum]

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]

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

[SpecChum]

Good plan.

Done.

[mc4man]

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


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

[SpecChum]

*slaps head*

Of course, obvious now you mention it, mc4man :)

Thanks for the light bulb!