The current case for many packages that use optdepends is as follows. Let's say a package called package1 installs some extra binaries or plugins. Those extra not so used binaries or plugins have extra dependencies (let's call them libsomething) marked as optdepends. so on installation pacman will say something: optional dependency: libsomething needed for package1 plugins to work. How about instead those extra binary files or plugins are split into another package called package1-plugins and have libsomething as plain dependency? Then on package1 installation, pacman should say something like: Recommended packages: package1-plugins for blah blah functionality. A good example is the pacman package itself which has an optional dependency on python for rankmirrors script. Maybe we could split it into a separate pacman-rankmirrors which depends on python the when a user installs/upgrades pacman package, he/she is prompted for recommended package pacman-rankmirrors for blah blah functionality. pacman-rankmirrors would depend on python. I think this is a better and cleaner approach. Obviously not every package can use that approach but it will clean some optdepends and remove some ldd errors because of uninstalled optdepends. Another thing, anyway to make pacman -Rns somepackage also remove optional dependencies that no other package uses?