strongdeps - Man Page

strongdeps [option] ... file ...

strongdeps computes the strong dependencies and the impact set of a set of packages. We say that p strongly depends on q if whenever p is installed then q must also be installed. The impact set of a package q is the set of all packages p that strongly depend on q.

Input files have to contain stanzas in the format of deb-control(5), separated by one blank line. For instance, the Packages files as found on a Debian mirror server, or in the directory /var/lib/apt/lists/ of a Debian system, are suitable as input. The repository used in the analysis consists of the union of all packages  from the input files.

The output of strongdeps is a CSV table containing strong dependencies, impact set and direct dependencies. If the option --checkonly is spefified, strongdeps prints on standard output the list of the packages that strong depends on each of the given packages. If --checkonly if paired with --dot then strongdeps prints on standard output the detransitivitazed graph of the strong dependencies of each package in dot format.

N.B. Since --checkonly computes only the strong dependencies of a set of packages, the impact set is not computed.

--checkonly package[,package] ...

Specifies a list of packages to check. By default all packages are checked. --checkonly and --table are mutually exclusive.

--dot

Print the strong dependency graph in dot format

--table

Print the table (package,strong,direct,difference) in the file data.csv

--detrans

Perform the transitive reduction of the strong dependency graph. This  option is implied by --checkonly

--transitive-closure

Perform the transitive closure of the direct dependency graph

--conj-only

Use the conjunctive graph only

-v

Enable info / warnings / debug messages. This option may be repeated up to three times in order to increase verbosity.

--progress

Display progress bars.

-h,  --help

Display this list of options.

 strongdeps --dot --checkonly "2ping,libc6" \
 deb:///var/lib/apt/lists/ftp.fr.debian.org_debian_dists_sid_main_binary-amd64_Packages

 strongdeps --table \
 deb:///var/lib/apt/lists/ftp.fr.debian.org_debian_dists_sid_main_binary-amd64_Packages

Pietro Abate, Jaap Boender, Roberto Di Cosmo

<http://www.mancoosi.org> is the home page of the Mancoosi project.

For a comprehensive explanation of the notion of strong dependency and impact set see

Strong Dependencies between Software Components,  by Pietro Abate, Jaap Boender, Roberto Di Cosmo, and Stefano Zacchiroli. <http://mancoosi.org/reports/>