I have legacy libmagick6 installed for some reason and it seems to receive updates like every week or so - and now, that update keeps failing bcs apparently it can’t find the PKGBUILD.
Rather than troubleshoot the build, I’d prefer just to find out which package even wants this lib and remove that if it’s something I don’t need.
Last time I tried to find out which package pulled in a specific dependency, it seemed like quite the rocket science to me and I never figured it out.
Does anyone have hints that a non-scientific user like me could pull off?
pacman -Qi libmagick6
You can also see which packages require it pamac, by opening its description’ Dependencies tab.
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Thank you. This command says it was required by rss-glx, which I now removed. libmagick6 is still installed though - checking for system updates still brings it up, and there isn’t even a button for removing it…?
Under the dependencies tab in Pamac, I can’t see a section stating which packages depend on this one though.
there is “Hängt ab von” (depends on), “Abhängigkeiten erstellen” (make dependencies), “Abhängigkeiten überprüfen” (check dependencies), “Optionale Abhängigkeiten” (optional dependencies). Maybe there is a translation error, and one of them should really be “packages depending on this” in German. However, rss-glx isn’t listed under any of these.
If @maycne.sonahoz’s command only showed rss-glx as depending package, then you should be fine to remove it after removing rss-glx:
sudo pacman -Rsn libmagick6
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Okay, done. Any idea though why there’s no option to remove it in Pamac GUI?
It seems the Remove and Build buttons only appear when accessing the package description from the Browse tab. I guess when accessing from the Updates tab, you are already in update mode, so other actions are not available from there.
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Navigate → Installed tab → Orphans
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While we’re on the subject of understanding Pamac, which ones exactly are the packages that are shown in the orphans list? Apparently they were all installed as dependencies…
So does anyone else think that’s not very intuitive, or at least it would make more sense to have all the available actions there for a package, no matter how you got to that screen?
That’s what an orphan is: a package previously installed as a dependency, but is now not required anymore (because of dependency changes or removal of the requiring package).
I guess enabling those actions from the Update tab would require to handle them differently than from the Browse tab – they are to be updated (by default) instead of rebuilt – so it ought to be safer to disable them if they’re not confident to do so… 
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