Right now, we have a problem with cyclic dependencies in core: systemd requires libblkid and libuuid (systemd-udevd) and util-linux requires libudev (findmnt, and soon uuidd [1]). I don't like this situation and currently it is revoled by adding systemd as optdepend to util-linux. This has the side effect that in a chroot with only certain packages installed, one has to explicitly install systemd to get findmnt working. Since I've run into this situation and cyclic deps are bad, I propose the following: Split both util-linux and systemd into libutil-linux/util-linux and libsystemd/systemd. Then we could have both util-linux and systemd depend on both libsystemd and libutil-linux. [1] http://www.spinics.net/lists/util-linux-ng/msg08699.html