[dr4g0n]

I was really thrown by the ligatures in some of the command snippets (diff and lostfiles).

Why do things manually have to be marked as dependencies? Is that because they were manually installed at one point, or does Arch's package manager not properly track dependencies?

[rakoo]

If a package really is installed as a dependency, it will be marked as such. If for some reason you manually install a package that is needed by another one, then it's a good thing to mark it as dependency.

In the case of cleaning your system, it is interesting to mark an unused package as a dependency; the resolver (see https://www.archlinux.org/pacman/pacman.8.html#_remove_optio...) will see that it's installed as a dependency, but no package depends on it. It's a quick way to "tag" them as unused so they can be "garbage collected" at a later time.