Pulling Xorg dependencies on headless machine

[H. S. Teoh]

On Sun, Jul 28, 2013 at 12:27:20AM +0200, nazriel wrote:
> What are the rationales for pulling in Xorg dependencies on headless
> machines like web server?
> 
> I am installing DMD on Debian machine from D-APT but I guess
> installing from dlang.org dpkg would result in the same behaviour.
> 
> Packages like noveau, readeon, intel drivers and other Xorg utilis
> are not very useful in such scenario.
> 
> Any way to fix it?

That depends on whether the DMD packages explicitly depend on X11 stuff.

If not, you might want to try 'apt-get install --no-install-recommends',
to see if you can evade X11 stuff, since most likely, some package
somewhere in the dependency chain recommends core X11 packages, which
will in turn pull in a whole bunch of other stuff.

If there *is* some X11 dependency somewhere, you can probably get away
with installing only x11-common just to satisfy dynamic library
requirements, and then use --no-install-recommends to evade having to
pull in a full Xorg server installation. Basically x11-common pulls in
some libraries that you may need for dynamic linking to work on some
program linked against X11 libraries, but it won't give you a functional
X11 installation so you can't actually use any X11 functionality.

If all else fails, there's always dpkg --force-depends, but I wouldn't
do that unless you *absolutely* can't get things to work otherwise.


T

-- 
People say I'm arrogant, and so I am!!