Re: finding dependencies

[cjw44@flatline.org.uk (Colin Watson)]

"Michael P. Soulier" <msoulier@storm.ca> wrote:
>    My apologies if this is blindingly obvious, but what's the best way
>to find out what packages are using a given package? If I want to yank
>some libraries, and I need to know what that is going to break, for
>example?

If you try to uninstall some package and dpkg won't let you, then you
know that something's using it. :)

There are several other ways:

  * Use dselect, and when you mark the package to remove you'll get a
    dependency conflict resolution screen listing any packages that
    depend on it. If you want to keep them, just press 'R' and then
    Enter to revert back to the state before you tried to remove the
    package.

  * 'apt-get remove package' will list other packages that it's going to
    remove and ask you if that's OK.

  * Install the grep-dctrl package, which is amazingly useful. You can
    then do things like 'grep-status
    -XFPre-Depends,Depends,Recommends,Suggests package' to search for
    packages that declare any kind of dependency on the named package

  * Install the deborphan package from woody, which will tell you what
    "orphan" libraries you have installed - that is, libraries on which
    nothing depends. With a little care, most of these can be safely
    removed.

-- 
Colin Watson                                     [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]