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.