strongdeps - indentify the strong dependency of a set of packages
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.
Specifies a list of packages to check. By default all packages are checked. --checkonly and --table are mutually exclusive.
Print the strong dependency graph in dot format
Print the table (package,strong,direct,difference) in the file data.csv
Perform the transitive reduction of the strong dependency graph. This option is implied by --checkonly
Perform the transitive closure of the direct dependency graph
Use the conjunctive graph only
Enable info / warnings / debug messages. This option may be repeated up to three times in order to increase verbosity.
Display progress bars.
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/>