No, a reference-count is not good enough, Tyler.  Or maybe I'm
misunderstanding you?

Let me give a fanciful, but concrete example:

Suppose that I'm a student working on a semester project, and
I need library A (libA.so) for my project.  Let's suppose that
I install it via:

  cd /usr/pkgsrc/devel/libA && make update

...now I'm happily developing.

Suppose then I take a weekend break and install /usr/pkgsrc/games/B.
B requires libA.  I fool with the game B for a bit, get bored, or
find it too addictive to keep it around, and pkg_delete (or
"make deinstall") on it.

libA's reference count drops to 0.  If I understand your proposal
correctly, libA will go away, which I definitely do not want to
have happening.


If the package sytem ever deletes "unused" packages that you
don't expressly ask to have deleted, then it should also record
the difference between packages that you expressly asked to have
installed versus those that were installed to meet requirements
of some other package...and should only delete packages that
were not expressly installed.


Am I a little clearer, now, or did I misunderstand you?

-- 
  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  http://www.olib.org/~rkr/