On Wed, 4 Jan 2012 13:14:54 -0800 (PST)
Darrell Anderson <humanreadable@...> wrote:

> A few days ago we discussed rebuilding libarts from the Trinity sources.
> 
> Yet I would like clarification about all of the packages in the dependencies and libraries branch. 
>Which are required, which are recommended, and what is an appropriate build order?

Well, after a bunch of culling, here's an autogenerated partial dependency 
tree (3 levels) for kdebase according to my system:

kde-base/kdebase-meta-3.5.13:
	kde-base/kdebase-startkde-3.5.13_p1183307   
		dev-util/cmake-2.8.4-r1   
		kde-base/kdesktop-3.5.13_p1183307   
			kde-base/libkonq-3.5.13_p1183307   
		kde-base/ksmserver-3.5.13_p1183307   
			dev-libs/dbus-tqt-3.5.13   
	kde-base/drkonqi-3.5.13_p1183307   
		sys-devel/gdb-7.2   
	kde-base/kcheckpass-3.5.13_p1183307   
		sys-libs/pam-1.1.5   
	kde-base/kcontrol-3.5.13_p1183307   
		net-fs/samba-3.5.11   
		virtual/libusb-0   
			dev-libs/libusb-0.1.12-r5   [or]
			dev-libs/libusb-compat-0.1.3   [or]
			sys-freebsd/freebsd-lib-9.0_rc1   
		sys-libs/libraw1394-2.0.4   
	kde-base/kdeprint-3.5.13_p1183307   
		app-text/enscript-1.6.4-r4   
		app-text/psutils-1.17   
	kde-base/kdm-3.5.13_p1183307   
		kde-base/kdebase-pam-7   
		sys-apps/dbus-1.4.16   
	kde-base/kdebase-kioslaves-3.5.13_p1183307   
		media-libs/openexr-1.7.0   
		dev-libs/cyrus-sasl-2.1.23-r4   

I haven't included dependencies which are part of X, or individual
applications inside kdebase that have no additional dependencies.  Since
I hand-installed a minimal system, these are likely all mandatory or
close to.  Some dependencies may be missing:  the same package for
KDE 3.5.10 also lists freetype, fontconfig, openssl, perl, opengl,
cups, eject, openldap, lm_sensors, glib, and a jre.  Some of those are
likely optional, though.
 
> Dependencies:
> 
> Build order presumed to be as listed (please correct!):
> 
> tqt3 or qt3 (is there a reason to build the latter rather than the former?)
> tqtinterface (required)
> arts (required)

Recommended, rather--there is a flag for building without it, and everything
does work as far as I can tell.

> dbus-1-tqt (required?)
> dbus-tqt (required?)

One or both (I can't tell, because the packages aren't handled quite the same
way for me) is required by ksmserver, as above.

> libart-lgpl (required?/recommended?)

Dependency for kdelibs, ksvg, kdeartwork-kscreensaver, possibly some others
I don't have installed.  Unless there's some way of building kdelibs without it,
I think we can call it "required".

> libkdcraw (recommended? which packages?)

I'm not sure how many of these are KDE4 results, since I don't have
the relevant packages installed and so am not sure of the versioning, 
but a query turned up calligra, krita, digikam, and kphotoalbum as 
depending on libkdcraw.

(I can give a shot at the other packages, but at >15 minutes to go through
the entire Gentoo package tree for each library (assuming that the package 
names even match up and that the search doesn't crash out), I sure hope 
that someone else has a better idea.)