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NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

is a program to help with the maintenance of large software distributions. It takes a list of seed packages and a mirror of the distribution, and produces outputs with the seed packages and their dependencies and build-dependencies expanded out in full. The contents of the Ubuntu distribution, and others, are managed by means of At their simplest, these are lists of packages which are considered important to have in the main component of the distribution, without explicitly listing all their dependencies and build-dependencies.
Seed lists are typically divided up by category: a or seed might list the core set of packages required to make the system run at all, while a seed might list the set of packages installed as part of a default desktop installation. takes these seeds, adds their dependency trees, and produces an for each seed which contains a dependency-expanded list of package names. These outputs may be handed on to archive maintenance or CD-building tools.
Some seeds may from other seeds: they rely on those seeds to be installed. For example, a seed will typically inherit from a seed. understands these inheritance relationships. If a package in the seed depends on but is already part of the seed or dependency list, then will not be added to the output.
Seeds are stored in text files downloaded from a given URL. Lines not beginning with (wiki-style list markup) are ignored. Seed entries beginning with expand to all binaries from the given source package. Seed entries may be followed with to indicate that they should only be used on the given architectures, or with to indicate that they should not be used on the given architectures.
Seed entries in parentheses indicate that the seed should be treated as a recommendation of metapackages generated from this seed, rather than as a dependency.
Seed entries beginning with cause the given package to be blacklisted from the given seed and any seeds from which it inherits; this may be followed by as above to blacklist all binaries from the given source package. Note that this may result in uninstallable packages whose dependencies have been blacklisted, so use this feature sparingly.
A
file alongside the seeds lists their inheritance relationships. There is typically no need for a default desktop installation to contain all the compilers and development libraries needed to build itself from source; if nothing else, it would consume much more space. Nevertheless, it is normally a requirement for the maintainers of a distribution to support all the packages necessary to build that distribution.
therefore does not add all the packages that result from following build-dependencies of seed packages and of their dependencies (the to every output, unless they are also in the seed or in the dependency list. Instead, it adds them to the special seed.
Like any other seed, the supported seed may contain its own list of packages. It is common to provide support for many software packages which are not in the default installation, such as debugging libraries, optimised kernels, alternative language support, and the like. The output files are named after the seed to which they correspond. An additional output file is needed for supported, namely which contains the supported list and the build-depends lists of the other seeds all joined together. An output is produced to represent the entire archive.
Some other files are produced for occasional use by experts. See the
file for full details on these.

OPTIONS

  • , Fetch seeds from The default is
or
if the option is used.
  • , Fetch seeds for distribution The default is
  • , Get package lists from The default is
  • , Operate on the specified distributions. The default is Listing multiple distributions may be useful, for example, when examining both a released distribution and its security updates.
  • , Operate on architecture The default is
  • , Operate on the specified components. The default is
  • , Check IPv6 status of source packages, using the statistics available at
  • bzr Check out seeds from the c bzr branch found at rather than fetching them directly from a URL. Requires c bzr to be installed.
  • no-rdepends Disable reverse-dependency calculations. These calculations cause a large number of small files to be written out in the
  • directory, and may take some time.
  • ,... Treat each as a seed by itself, inheriting from (i.e. assuming that all packages in the seed are already installed while calculating the additional dependencies of This allows the use of to calculate the dependencies of individual extra packages.
  • BUGS

    The wiki-style markup in seeds was inherited from an early implementation, and is a wart.
    can sometimes be confused by complicated situations involving the order in which it encounters dependencies on virtual packages. Explicit entries in seeds may be required to work around this.
    Handling of installer packages (udebs) is complicated, poorly documented, and doesn't always work quite right: in particular, packages aren't demoted to the supported seed when they should be.
    The supported seed is more hard-coded than it should be.

    AUTHORS

    is copyright 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 See the GNU General Public License version 2 or later for copying conditions. A copy of the GNU General Public License is available in