Why is XTerm a dependency of KDbg?

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1

I can’t imagine why an entire terminal would need to be a dependency, especially because I presume it uses the Konsole KPart in the GUI?

RokeJulianLockhart@SNRW3Q:~$ sudo dnf install kdbg
Updating and loading repositories:
 Fedora 41 - x86_64 - Updates                                     100% |  41.2 KiB/s |  26.5 KiB |  00m01s
 Fedora 41 - x86_64 - Updates                                     100% |   1.2 MiB/s |   1.5 MiB |  00m01s
Repositories loaded.
Package                           Arch      Version                           Repository              Size
Installing:
 kdbg                             x86_64    1:3.1.0-4.fc41                    fedora             924.2 KiB
Installing dependencies:
 mkfontscale                      x86_64    1.2.3-1.fc41                      fedora              49.2 KiB
 xterm                            x86_64    395-1.fc41                        updates              1.9 MiB
Installing weak dependencies:
 xorg-x11-fonts-misc              noarch    7.5-39.fc41                       fedora               6.1 MiB

Transaction Summary:
 Installing:         4 packages

Total size of inbound packages is 6 MiB. Need to download 6 MiB.
After this operation, 9 MiB extra will be used (install 9 MiB, remove 0 B).

RokeJulianLockhart@SNRW3Q:~$ sudo dnf remove xterm
Package                           Arch      Version                           Repository              Size
Removing:
 xterm                            x86_64    395-1.fc41                        updates              1.9 MiB
Removing dependent packages:
 kdbg                             x86_64    1:3.1.0-4.fc41                    fedora             924.2 KiB
Removing unused dependencies:
 mkfontscale                      x86_64    1.2.3-1.fc41                      fedora              49.2 KiB
 xorg-x11-fonts-misc              noarch    7.5-39.fc41                       fedora               6.1 MiB

Transaction Summary:
 Removing:           4 packages

github.com/j6t/kdbg/issues isn’t the place to ask this, and they don’t have GitHub Discussions enabled there.

Additionally, if it’s a packaging bug, I should probably put it through bugzilla.redhat.com/enter_bug.cgi?component=kdbg&product=Fedora&version=41 instead.

2

It doesn’t seem to be a KDE project and it uses XTerm to show the program output, so I guess that’s correct.

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3

I know it’s been solved, but I’m going to add that this is an issue to take up with the fedora maintainers. Debian for instance hasn’t had kdbg since buster (released in 2019) and that didn’t have any terminal emulator dependency in it.

@jbb
The website for kdbg says it has KDE as a direct dependency. Though, it still makes no sense for fedora to package up xterm as a dependency. I’m kinda surprised that OP didn’t have xterm installed to begin with given how it’s called the standard x11 terminal emulator.

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4

@northlean, thanks for that! I’ll file it as a packaging bug at RedHat’s Bugzilla instance.

However, per the undermentioned:

@jbb, how can I confirm this? I don’t see a terminal in its GUI anywhere. I’m not familiar with it, though.

It might be commonplace on X11 installations, but there’s little reason to depend upon it - even under XOrg 11, KDE applications still just use Konsole, as an example. Additionally, I’m using KWin’s Wayland implementation as my display server and compositor, with very few XWayland applications.

5

I have just quickly tried launching an executable in it, but admittedly I haven’t checked the code if it is able to handle other terminal emulators if xterm is not available.

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