Packaging in Debian

Who is who

  • dpkg, “a medium-level package manager for Debian”
  • apt, “the main command-line package manager for Debian and its derivatives”
  • aptitude, “an Ncurses and command-line based front-end to numerous Apt libraries” or just “TUI for Apt”

Recipies

Reverse dependencies

  1. A simple one

    apt rdepends bash

    or more precise

    apt-cache \
        rdepends \
        --no-recommends \
        --no-suggests \
        --no-enhances \
        --recurse \
        --installed \
        perl
  2. More complicated and informative

    aptitude why bash

Package the file came from

$ dpkg -S `which bash`

Packages from alternative sources

$ grep Package /var/lib/apt/lists/*amd64_Packages \
    | grep -v ubuntu\.com \
    | grep -v canonical\.com