Indent second level requirements while freezing

[techtonik]

While looking at requirement.txt it is often hard to figure out why a particular package is here. Is it feasible with pip to produce indented tree that gives an explanation about why a package is added to the fridge contents.

aspen==0.37
   filesystem_tree==1.0.1
   first==2.0.1
mimeparse==0.1.3

The indented requirements.txt is parsed correctly with pip's.

[jamezpolley]

I can think of two immediate questions

How would this look if aspen and mieparse both have a dependency on filesystem_tree?

How would this look if aspen depends on filesystem_tree which depends on first which depends on second which depends on third which depends on fourth which depends on fifth...

[techtonik]

How would this look if aspen and mieparse both have a dependency on filesystem_tree?

The first listed wins if you want to avoid duplication. But you may want to list both, especially if version requirements are different.

How would this look if aspen depends on filesystem_tree which depends on first which depends on second which depends on third which depends on fourth which depends on fifth...

Beautiful.

aspen
  filesystem_tree
    first
      second
        third
          ...

Looks more useful than a plain list, but this is a very rare case.

[piotr-dobrogost]

FYI the requested feature is the reason https://github.com/naiquevin/pipdeptree was created.

[dstufft]

Closing this, this seems to be handled by pipdeptree and ultimately we can't tell why something was installed, so something can be both a dependency and something at the top level with no way to differentiate.

[techtonik]

ultimately we can't tell why something was installed

OS level packaging can do this. Should I open a feature request to support it?