Re: purging wayland
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
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