Dependencies for biblatex and friends

[Karl Berry]

    the dependencies for biblatex and friends should be as follows

I installed them, except:

    - ifthen (latex)
    - keyval (graphics)

I don't see the use in creating dependencies on "latex" and "graphics".
They are required packages to use LaTeX.

There's no way to make a dependency on ifthen.sty specifically;
dependencies are at the package level, not file level.

    All biblatex-... packages bundles depend at least on biblatex, 

Sorry, I am not enthused about adding that.

    some like biblatex-apa also require Biber (but I'm not sure if you
    want to model that in the dependencies).

Doesn't sound like a good idea to me. Aside from anything else, someone
might want to install biblatex-apa on machine X which biber does not
support, but use it on machine Y.

TeX Live is less user-friendly than MiKTeX wrt dependencies. It's not
feasible to do a minimal installation and expect "tlmgr install foo" to
bring in everything that foo needs or might need, which seems to be your
goal (if not, sorry, and just stating this, again, for the future). It
can't be done with static dependencies at all, and even if we tried, we
can't possibly maintain the thousands of dependencies implied.

Best,
Karl