New comment by jarda-wien on void-packages repository https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/pull/28377#issuecomment-770816779 Comment: > The consensus is that packages shouldn't depend on ncurses-base, packages use some terminfo that can't be expressed as dependency as it depends on your TERM variable. Generally ncurses-base should be installed as part of the base system i.e. the base-system metapackage, it's deliberately not part of base-minimal as it would increase container sizes. If we would start to add ncurses-base to everything that might need it, we would effectively add it to base-minimal as i.e. util-linux's cfdisk "depends" on terminfo descriptions. My main use case for the testdisk package was having it in a minimal docker container, so I didn't have "base-system" installed. While I understand the reasoning behind *the consensus*, I am not sure if we have any means of at least warning the user that something is missing. Being mostly on archlinux systems, I am not very seasoned in metadata fields provided by void packages. I tried googling something like optional dependecies and came across [this](https://github.com/void-linux/xbps/issues/1). Please point me to some preferred possibility of informing the user that something is missing in the current environment. If there is no such tool available, I guess you can reject this PR and keep things the way they are.