apt-rdepends - performs recursive dependency listings similar to apt-cache
SYNOPSIS
apt-rdepends [options] [pkgs ...]
DESCRIPTION
apt-rdepends searches through the APT cache to find package
dependencies. apt-rdepends knows how to emulate the result
of calling apt-cache with both depends and dotty
options.
By default, apt-rdepends shows a listing of each dependency
a package has. It will also look at each of these fulfilling packages,
and recursively lists their dependecies.
OPTIONS
"-b,
Show build dependencies instead of normal package dependencies.
"-d,
dotty takes a list of packages on the command line and generates
output suitable for use by springgraph. The result will be a set of
nodes and edges representing the relationships between the
packages. By default the given packages will trace out all dependent
packages which can produce a very large graph.
Blue lines are pre-depends, green lines are conflicts, yellow lines
are suggests, orange lines are recommends, red lines are replaces,
and black lines are depends.
Caution, dotty cannot graph larger sets of packages.
"-p,
Shows the state of each dependency after each package version.
See --state-follow and --state-show for why this is useful.
"-r,
Shows the listings of each package that depends on a package.
Furthermore, it will look at these dependent packages, and find their
dependers.
"-f,
A comma-separated list of DEPENDS types to follow recursively.
By default, it only follows the Depends type.
The possible values for DEPENDS are: Depends, PreDepends,
Suggests, Recommends, Conflicts, Replaces, and
Obsoletes.
In --build-depends mode, the possible values are: Build-Depends,
Build-Depends-Indep, Build-Conflicts, Build-Conflicts-Indep.
"-s,
A comma-separated list of DEPENDS types to show, when displaying
a listing. By default, it only shows the Depends type.
"--state-follow=STATES"
"--state-show=STATES"
These two options are similar to --follow and --show. They both
deal with the current state of a package. By default, the value of
STATES is Unknown, NotInstalled, UnPacked, HalfConfigured,
HalfInstalled, ConfigFiles, and Installed.
These options are useful, if you only want to only look at the
dependencies between the Installed packages on your system. You
can then call:
apt-rdepends --state-follow=Installed libfoo
Or if you want to only show the packages installed on your system:
apt-rdepends does not emulate apt-cache perfectly. It does
not display information about virtual packages, nor does it know about
virtual packages when it is in reverse dependency mode.
apt-rdepends also does not know how to stop after a certain depth
has been reached.
apt-rdepends cannot do reverse build-dependencies. This is really
difficult, since it would have to load the whole cache into memory
before discovering which packages depend on others to build.
apt-rdepends exists. This functionality should really reside in
apt-cache itself.
AUTHOR
apt-rdepends was written by Simon Law <sfllaw@debian.org>
