NAME

       Edos-debcheck - Check satisfiability of Debian package dependencies

SYNOPSIS

       edos-debcheck [option] ... [package] ...

DESCRIPTION

       edos-debcheck  reads  from  standard  input a set of Debian package descriptions, each of which is in the
       format of deb-control(5). 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 to edos-debcheck.

       Packages  may  appear with multiple versions in this set. We say that a package is identified in this set
       by the pair consisting of the package name and of the package version.

       A package (called goal) is called installable with respect to a set of packages if there exists a  subset
       of the packages that
        - contains at most one version for each package name
        - contains the goal package (in any version, or a specific version)
        - all packages of the subset have their dependencies and conflicts satisfied in this subset. Pre-depends
       are treated like Depends, and Breaks are treated like Conflicts.

       Debcheck  checks  whether every package given as argument is installable with respect to the input set of
       packages. Specific versions can be specified by following the package name with  the  sign  '='  and  the
       version of the package (for instance, 'xemacs21=21.4.17-1'). If no package name is given as argument then
       all packages of the input set are checked for satisfiability.

       The constraint solving algorithm is complete, that is it finds a solution whenever there exists one, even
       for  multiple  disjunctive  dependencies  and  deep  package  conflicts.  This problem is computationally
       infeasible in theory (that is, NP-complete), but can in practice be solved very efficiently for  Packages
       files occurring actually in Debian.

OPTIONS

       -i file
              Specify  an additional input file containing stanzas in deb-control(5) format.  These packages are
              checked for installability the same way as packages read from standard input.

       -I file
              Specify an additional input file containing stanzas in deb-control(5) format.  These packages that
              are not checked for installability but only used for resolving dependencies.

       -explain
              Explain the results

       -rules Print generated rules

       -failures
              Only show failures

       -successes
              Only show successes

       -checkonly list
              where list is a comma-separated list of package names.  Check only for installability of  packages
              with  name  in list (of any available version). This means that if a package does not exist in the
              input pool then the test passes (since all available  versions  are  in  that  case  installable).
              However, a warning is issued in case a package mentionend in list is not available.

              In  the  context  of  this option, a package of the form src:p expands to the list of all packages
              that stem from the source package p.

       -quiet Supress warnings and progress/timing messages

       -xml   Output results in XML format

       -help, --help
              Display this list of options

EXIT CODE

       The exit code is 0 when all packages that were asked to be checked (either explicitly with the -checkonly
       option, or because they exist in the package pool file) are available and found to be installable, it  is
       1  when  a least one of these packages is available but not installable, and it is 2 when at least one of
       the packages is not available but all available packages are found to be  installable.  Hence,  the  exit
       code 2 can occur only when the -checkonly option is used.

EXAMPLE

       Check which packages in a particular distribution are not installable and why:

         edos-debcheck -failures -explain < Packages

       where  Packages  is  the  file  pertaining  to  that distribution, as for instance found in the directory
         /var/lib/apt/lists.

       Check whether the xemacs21 and debhelper packages are installable in a distribution described by the file
       Packages:

         edos-debcheck -explain -checkonly xemacs21,debhelper < Packages

       Check whether the package bibtex2html, and all binary packages stemming from the  ocaml  source  package,
       are installable

        edos-debcheck -explain -checkonly bibtex2html,src:ocaml < Packages

AUTHOR

       Edos-debcheck  has  been written by Jerome Vouillon for the EDOS project. This man-page has been compiled
       by Ralf Treinen.

SEE ALSO

       deb-control(5)

       <http://www.edos-project.org> is the home page of the EDOS project.

       edos-rpmcheck(1) is the analogous tool for rpm packages.

EDOS                                               2009-08-18                                   EDOS-DEBCHECK(1)