Having explicit dependences on shared libraries in packages was taken straight from playbook of some Department of Redundancy Department. For any dynamically li

Having explicit dependences on shared libraries in packages was taken straight from playbook of some Department of Redundancy Department. For any dynamically linked ELF binnary, the loader (/lib/ld.so or similar) notifies which libraries are missing upon execution. It doesn't take much to locate relevant library packages... Resolution at runtime could be mostly automated; say a dialog asking ``Install 5 packages (15MB in total) now? [Yes] [No]''. Probably same goes for modules of Python, Perl etc. I recall Vim being marked as requiring Perl, Python and a half dozen other heavyweights (in PLD distro) simply because it had some optional support for those. Attempting to recover half-upgraded, half-broken system over slow connnection really sucked.