Re: How to find out apt-get's reasoning

[Nathan Poznick <poznick@conwaycorp.net>]

Thus spake Jonathan Matthews:
> I'm not asking anyone to tell me why my particular mix of sources is 
> doing this, I'm wondering more if there's a grep-available or grep-dctrl 
> invocation that might tell me which *installed* packages *depend* on 
> kdelibs-data.  Yes, I know "kdelibs & kdelibs4", but neither of them is 
> installed.

well, 

grep-available -F Depends -s Package kdelibs | cut -d' ' -f2

will show you a list of all packages which exist which depend on
kdelibs.  you can then do other things to that list... such as the very
wonky and very very slow:

for i in `grep-available -F Depends -s Package kdelibs | cut -d' ' -f2`; do
  dpkg -l $i | grep ^ii
done

(it would be a lot better to just toss all of the packages that
grep-available returns into one long string and invoke dpkg once with
that, and grep for those which are installed)

-- 
Nathan Poznick <poznick@conwaycorp.net>

Besides the practical knowledge which defeat offers, there are
important personality profits to be taken. Defeat strips away false
values and makes you realize what you really want. It stops you from
chasing butterflies and puts you to work digging gold. - William
Moulton Marston