Add functionality to find dependent packages

[kosist]

Just the idea - not sure whether it is possible to implement.

There are some packages, which are used as dependencies in other packages. And, we can find dependencies of the packages by sending package to configuration; but we can not find packages which are dependent on some particular packages.

If we could do something like right click on the package in the list -> Find dependent packages, and it would show us list of packages (ideally even not installed) which use that package as dependency, that could be sometimes useful.

Now, for example, we use some package as dependency, and I was wondering whether there are some other toolkits which use it as dependency. But, there is no way to find it out - unless to check information for each of the package or trying to install them.

Thank you very much,

Sincerely, Ivan.

[Jim Kring]

This is a great idea @kosist -- yes, it would be nice to know which packages declare a package as a dependency without having to open them up individually.

I'm curious how you might use this feature. Can you explain a little bit more about what sort of programming or project-management problems you might solve with this?

I can think of some (that I'm happy to share), yet I'm curious to hear what you think, before I bias the conversation

[kosist]

Thank you @Jim Kring.

In my case, I would not use it often. Just, for example, recently I was curious to find out how many toolkits use ESF toolkit (which is unpublished, but possible to download from NI forum). So I knew about one toolkit which was built based on ESF, but had no idea about the others.

But now when I think it through, I can not find other cases when I'd need to check dependent packages - unless to find out which package is used in other toolkits, or in other words how much popular that toolkit is, or something like that...

[Jim Kring]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this, Ivan.

I agree that this is a helpful use case. I think there are a couple aspects to this:

1) For a potential user of a package to know if other people are using the package -- this adds some credibility that others trust it and likely indicates some level of expected quality. 

2) For a developer/publisher of a package to understand who the users (dependency project) are, to possibly understand how people are using it and what possible impacts changes to a package might have.

I like the idea of supporting this (I would surely use it), and I wonder how users would find value in it. Let's see how many votes/comments it gets