Re: Please notify your rdepends' maintainers if you break an interface

[Kurt Roeckx <kurt@roeckx.be>]

On Sat, Aug 13, 2005 at 06:33:59PM +0200, Marc 'HE' Brockschmidt wrote:
> Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.net> writes:
> > apt-rdepends
> 
> Interesting, but not useful for the case I had today:
> 
> he@nahar:~$ apt-rdepends --build-depends --reverse foo
> E: Reverse build-dependencies are not supported

And the man page says so too:
       apt-rdepends cannot do reverse build-dependencies.  This is really dif-
       ficult, since it would have to load the whole cache into memory before
       discovering which packages depend on others to build.

What I ussually do is:
grep-dctlr -F Build-Depends foo -s Package Sources

Where Sources points to the apt Sources file.

This will only find direct build dependencies, and this is
ussually enough.  Note that you need to do the same for
Build-Depends-Indep too.

If you want to have everything that needs it
installed to build, you'll have to do some more work:

apt-cache rdepends foo

And then for each of those you'll need to do the grel-dctlr above
again.

Afaik, this should catch all of them.

I would love to see a command which automates all of this for me.


Kurt