whoneeds

whoneeds shows explicitly installed Arch Linux packages that transitively depend on another installed package.

It preserves the historical command interface:

whoneeds <package-name>

Example output:

Packages that depend on [zlib]
  pacman

When no explicitly installed dependents are found, it prints:

Packages that depend on [zlib]
  None

Backend

whoneeds is implemented in safe Rust and delegates package graph discovery to official Arch tooling:

• pactree -lru <package> from pacman-contrib lists reverse dependencies.
• pacman -Qqe lists explicitly installed packages.

The result is the sorted intersection of those two sets, excluding the queried package itself.

Development Checks

make check

The repository includes .githooks/pre-commit, which runs the same formatter, tests, and pedantic Clippy checks used by make check.

Enable the tracked hook in this clone with:

git config core.hooksPath .githooks

Installation

make install DESTDIR="$pkgdir" PREFIX=/usr

Runtime dependency on Arch Linux:

• pacman-contrib