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Re: dpkg options



> From pgarcia@execpc.com  Mon Mar 30 15:56:12 1998
>
> The man page for dpkg says it's inaccurate and also out of date.  Is
> there an updated man page somewhere?  I was just wondering if there might
> be some options for the program that are not listed in the man or --help
> pages.  For example, is there an option to get the long description of an
> installed package (as opposed to the output of -l)?  Is there a way to list
> the packages that depend on a certain installed package, and a way to list
> the packages that a certain installed package depends on?  I suspect that
> these options may just be undocumented.  If they don't exist, they probably
> should; all this info is available in /var/lib/dpkg/status (and besides, I
> think you can do these things with rpm, and I wouldn't want that tool to
> out-do dpkg in any way ;-).
>
>
> Phil Garcia
> pgarcia@execpc.com
>
>

I don't remember to see dpkg having anything other than this incomplete man page.
BTW, dpkg --r[force-]help and dpkg-deb --help give you all the options "available"
in dpkg, may be just without enough explanations but there I go:

dpkg --status (aka -s) <package>
gives you the description as find in the status file, which means all of it if it's
installed, mostly nothing elsewhere.

dpkg --print-avail <package>
gives you the information set in the available files, which you can find useful for
not installed package. This information is set when you run the Update step in dselect
or by running dpkg --{merge, update}-avail Packages.gz.

Also, they're the pkg-order utilities, in frozen. They're are a little poorly documented
but take a look at pkg-deptree and pkg-revdep script. Deity (the next generation of dselect)
will be more attractive and should have some utility. But remember that Debian dependencies
are really more robust and more complex than the rpm style, don't expect to have the same
fast responsiveness as with RH.

Good Exploration!

Fab.

PS: May be you should take a look at dftp... It's really has nice features, may be that's what you
need?


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Fabien Ninoles
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