A program that uses libpcp to gather performance metrics with a PM_CONTEXT_LOCAL always also needs the pcp package, for the pmdas, pmcpp, and maybe other things.

Also, the daemon is in the "pcp" package.

However, the "pcp" package depends on a lot of things that shouldn't be necessary for a basic installation, such as Python, Perl, and some of their modules.

It would be nice to get a minimal but useful installation of PCP without dragging in optional things.

To make this more concrete, one could start with the "kernel.all.cpu.user" metric and put only those things into the minimal package that are needed to make it work locally and via the daemon.  No pmlogger.

Then we add all pmdas that don't increase the dependencies.

The point of this is to make PCP more palatable for Fedora Atomic, etc, but I can't speak for them.