I noticed recently that the size of the Fedora Server DVD grew quite a
bit between F21 and F22, despite not really changing the requested
content. I've been trying to do a bit of analysis to see what packages
are pulling in huge numbers of dependencies.
For a first pass, I wrote a simple Python script to analyze the dep
chains of every package on the Fedora Server standard install and also
on the "full" install (clicking every optional component checkbox in
Anaconda). Right now, the output only shows which packages have the
largest *count* of dependencies (it doesn't dabble in installed size at
all), but it can give us an idea of which packages are pulling in the
most stuff and start focusing our efforts on breaking the dependencies.
So, for each of the output files, what you will see is the recursive
(non-repeating) count of the number of packages necessary to satisfy
the dependencies for every package on the system.
It's certainly worth mentioning that the "winner" is freeipa
(specifically, freeipa-server-trust-ad, which pulls in pretty much
everything else in the freeipa stack). With a little quick examination
though, one can also see that pki-ca (a dependency of FreeIPA) is sixth
from the top, so it's worth looking at whether any part of its chain
can be broken.
Anyway, enjoy this (mostly) raw data. I'll continue to process it and
see what else turns up.
Side-note: the two lists do not always have the same count for all
packages; I suspect that this is due to having multiple possibilities
to satisfy the same dependency, where one may be pulled in explicitly
during the maximal install where the despsolver might have chosen
another during the standard install.