Hi! The first part is only a theoretical discussion only, because changing the db backend is not so easy ;-). There is nothing wrong with the current way, I just don't like it ;-), because it makes pacman's source more difficult to understand and we need some extra computation when resolving/modifying dependencies. I think storing storing "satisfied dependencies" to/'instead of' requiredby, because this is more plausible. This is the information what we need during package update and removal (if we check that any of the remaining packages satisfies this dependency). So we need to figure out dependencies (yes, more than one possible!) between the current package and its requiredby package, which is boring ;-) And %DEPENDS% should store all packages too which satisfies the dep. A 'depends' example: %DEPENDS% foo1: foo1 foo2<=1.0: foo2 provide_foo: foo3_0, foo3_1 foo4: BROKEN %REQUIREDBY% foo5: provide_foo2 foo5: foo5=1.0 ... ------------------------------------- A function for depsearch would be nice (this can be called from _alpm_depcheck and similar) + in case of searching other provider (before removal of package which may break a "providedep") for example Bye, ngaba