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Ashwin Nanjappa
Asked: 2013-02-27 18:50:29 +0800 CST

How to visually display dependencies of a package?

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This is just for fun and curiosity: is there a tool using which I can visually see the dependencies of a package as a graph?

That is, the packages that a given package depends on. This can be a command-line tool that displays using ASCII graphics (like tree or Mercurial's graphlog) or a GUI tool that shows the dependency graph visually. Any other combination of tools that can show the dependencies visually works too.

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3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    debtree

    According to the application's website, the debtree package provides "package dependency graphs on steroids".

    Note: This is also very useful when planning software upgrades. This application is able to graph dependencies against packages which have not yet been installed on your system. This will read from the sources.list file (usually located at /etc/apt/sources.list) and it will perform a live query using that list.

    The following diagram is an example of running debtree against the package dpkg. Here is a map of its dependencies:

    To install debtree from the command line(Ctrl+Alt+t) enter the following command:

    sudo apt-get install debtree

    Usage

    • Create a .dot file (a directed graph drawing - see the man dot manpage):

        debtree --with-suggests <package> >out.dot

    • Create a graph (PNG) from a .dot file:

        dot -T png -o out.png out.dot

    • Create a graph (Postscript) and view it using Okular:

        debtree <package> | dot -Tps | okular - &

    Be aware that when running this application against larger packages (e.g. gedit), the images can quickly become unwieldy and illegible.

    Note that apt-rdepends can also be used in a similar manner, but piping output into a graphic is a bit more convoluted, in my opinion.

    See also: Ubuntu debtree man page

    • 44

  2. Maybe not so "graphical" but if you prefer not installing any extra packages you can run

    apt-cache rdepends <package>

    Take a look also to depends option.

    You also have:

    • apt rdepends <package>
    • Use this script, apt-rdepends-tree <package>
    • apt-rdepends <package> or as debtree apt-rdepends --dotty package | springgraph > dependencies.png
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  3. The command-line tool Apitude is a great tool for looking at dependencies. no fancy graphs, but it does give you a nice hierarchic representation of dependencies for a specific package.

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