Currently the only program I use that has a hard libsoup dependency is inkscape, and I patched it to run without libsoup. So I have no libsoup installed currently (I use MATE with tint2, xsettingsd and openbox), and I still can do system updates and access the net with a browser. Since the patch for inkscape is fairly simple, I suspect libsoup is an add-on for telemetry purposes (why does an SVG editor need access to a web server?)
So what does libsoup do, apart from telemetry?
mate's weather app in the task bar which i assume you aren't using since you are using tint2?
i made a screenshot from pamac-manager. are you using webkit2gtk for anything?
i'm using mate without any fine tuning that you have done.
You can use
pactree -r libsoup
(from
galaxy/pacman-contrib) to see which packages on your system depend on that package. Among others,
gtk3.
I build my own gtk3, without libsoup. As I said, I don't have libsoup installed. I also built gvfs with http=false. No libsoup far and wide. No webkit. So what does libsoup do, except gratuitous fattening of default packages?
Edit:
Thank you for the quick reply, but it seems you were answering the wrong question. I can, and do, look up dependencies myself (I build a lot of stuff from source). I was asking, why do developers think I need libsoup? Who told them I have to want it? Why is there no option to disable it? (and probably other stuff that I have yet ti find). I run a desktop, a weather app is of little use to me. And an SVG editor doesn't need web server access.
gtk3 doesn't depend on libsoup, according to pacman -Sii gtk3, but as I said, I build my own.
I don't maintain GTK, so I'm not familiar with the details, but I have notified the Artix team about this.
Use check-link-consistency -N from the universe repository with libsoup installed and uninstalled, this will tell you what you have installed that links to that lib, then you can investigate the source code of those packages as well as libsoup to find out how they interact. Typically libs export a range of predefined functions which other code can use by linking to that library, usually it's done simply to save writing and maintaining similar functions in your own code, ie not re-inventing the wheel, rather than a sinister plot - but there's no harm in checking up on that just in case, after all, somebody needs to keep a lookout for that sort of thing!! :D