The weird thing about needing a lot of dependencies is that sysctl is a pretty simple application. It's just a list of variables you read out of the kernel. I

The weird thing about needing a lot of dependencies is that sysctl is a pretty simple application. It's just a list of variables you read out of the kernel. It doesn't seem like the program that manages it should be terribly complex. Granted, this program does the manpage lookup for each variable so that adds some complexity, but that could be pre-compiled into a standardized data format pretty easily.