which-pkg-broke (1)

Leading comments

which-pkg-broke.1 - find which package might have broken another
Copyright (C) 2006 Javier Fernandez-Sanguino

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
any later version.

On Debian systems, a copy of the GNU General Public License version 2
can be found in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2.

(The comments found at the beginning of the groff file "man1/which-pkg-broke.1".)

NAME

which-pkg-broke - find which package might have broken another

SYNOPSIS

which-pkg-broke package

DESCRIPTION

The which-pkg-broke program will retrieve a list of the named package and all its dependencies sorted by the time they were installed on the system (as determined from the mtime information of /var/lib/dpkg/info/*.list ).
This tool makes it possible for a system admin to obtain information that might correlate installation of package dependencies with a package breakage in order to find which package update might be responsible for the breakage.

EXAMPLES

This tool can be useful determine which package dependencies were upgraded more recently and might be associated with the bug that is being observed. For example, if aptitude stops working properly, an administrator can run:

$ which-pkg-broke aptitude
Package <libapt-pkg-libc6.3-5-3.3> has no install time info
libdb1-compat Fri Aug 8 03:02:11 2003
libsigc++-1.2-5c102 Fri Aug 8 05:15:58 2003
aptitude Sun Jan 11 17:38:06 2004
libncurses5 Sun Jan 18 08:11:05 2004
libc6 Thu Jan 22 07:55:10 2004
libgcc1 Tue Jan 27 07:37:22 2004
gcc-3.3-base Tue Jan 27 07:37:31 2004
libstdc++5 Tue Jan 27 07:37:32 2004

So depending on exactly when the misbehaviour started, there may be a reason to point the finger at a more-recently updated library like libstdc++ or libncurses, which are more-recently installed than aptitude itself.

SEE ALSO

rc-alert(1)

AUTHOR

which-pkg-broke was written by Bill Gribble <grib AT billgribble.com>
This manual page was written by Javier Fernandez-Sanguino for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution.