Tarjei Knapstad (tarjei.knapstad(a)predichem.com) said: > Would it be possible to map out the package dependencies in Fedora by > doing rpm queries and forming a directed graph of the results? (by using > graphviz or something like that) http://adrian.gimp.org/rpm-graph/

In any case, the example graph for RH 7.0 was a lot more of a clutter than I had feared/hoped and pretty much unusable as a reference. Think I'll just forget about this for now... Thanks again, -- Tarjei

[Disclaimer: This is probably going to end up as a blurb about dependencies - bear with me :)] Firstly, I was just perusing through the FC4 package description list and was reminded of something I've thought of many times: Would it be possible to map out the package dependencies in Fedora by doing rpm queries and forming a directed graph of the results? (by using graphviz or something like that) I think such a package dependency map would be quite useful to get an overview of the distribution, both for developers and users. "End nodes" in the graph could help identify candidates that could be moved to extras for instance (you might even tag vertices with the package size). >From the users perspective it would get a lot easier to get an overview of the impact of removing a package, or if you want to rebuild a homebrew package for some reason ("I'd really like to just rebuild this package myself to the bleeding edge, but what else would it impact and maybe even break, if anything?"). Secondly I was thinking of a "DependencyLint" kind of tool - a small Python script maybe that would go through every installed RPM on a system and check if the requirements in the .spec files are correct and/or sufficient. Here I'm not quite sure about what the rules are for Fedora however - should absolutely everything that's needed to build a package be in BuildRequires:? Should every package that has C code require glibc? Or is it a goal to be as lax as possible to prevent (hopefully) unnecessary build problems? In any case I was thinking of maybe using a combination of RPM querying and ldd (and possibly other tools). An example (from a FC1 box): 1. Get a list of all the RPM's on the system. 2. For each package, list the files and grep the bin/ and lib/ stuff. For instance 'rpm -ql mutt|grep bin' lists /usr/bin/mutt as one of it's files. 3. Check which dynamic libraries these binaries and libraries depend on using 'ldd'. 'ldd /usr/bin/mutt' lists /usr/lib/libz.so.1 among others. 4. For each of these, check which package provides them. 'rpm -q --whatprovides /usr/lib/libz.so.1' returns 'zlib-1.2.0.7-2' 5. Finally check that the original package depends on zlib. (This step I'm not sure what's the best way to query.) 'rpm -q --requires mutt' does not list zlib and 'rpm -e --test zlib' does not list mutt so we've actually found a missing dependency here. These are just my first thoughts to maybe encourage some discussion. I'm sure this could be done in a better way and could probably also be expanded to do other stuff (I'm not very RPM-savvy). If you run a live testinstall of rawhide for instance such a tool could be run automatically after each update to detect any packaging problems wrt. dependencies.

Would it be possible to map out the package dependencies in Fedora by doing rpm queries and forming a directed graph of the results? (by using graphviz or something like that)