Well, this is something I spent quite a bit of time on yesterday, with some help from bonsaikitten on figuring out the python madness. Before ferringb tells it again, no, I know this isn't foolproof, cannot be 100% in coverage, won't cover dlopen, conditional includes, bash source inherit or other such fancy things that people do :) However, it somewhat works ;) What it does : given a list of files ( `etcat files category/package` generates a nice one ) it scans them, classifies into "scripts, perl, python, libraries, executables" , then does its best to parse theese into generating a list of -needed- files. This means that it outputs a list of shared libraries linked against, python modules imported, perl modules, and script interpreters ( #!/bin/bash ...) So, taking that list you can then play around a bit with `qpkg -f` and you'll end up with a nice list of packages that are actually used. So, I know it isn't foolproof, don't expect it to be. However, feedback would be nice, patches and so on. oh, where it lives? cvs : gentoo/users/spider/depreverse , expects to be ran from the current directory as it calls "./..." for the included scripts. http://www.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/users/spider/depreverse/?root=gentoo //Spider -- begin .signature Tortured users / Laughing in pain See Microsoft KB Article Q265230 for more information. end