Practical Package Administration under Debian

Configuration Files

Many packages contain prepared configuration files. You can display these with dlocate with the -conf option (Listing 9). Further configuration files that are added to the system for a package will however go undetected. dlocate only analyzes the information contained in the original package.

Listing 9

dlocate

$ dlocate -conf xpdf
/etc/xpdf/xpdfrc
/etc/X11/Xresources/xpdf

Distribution Consistency

APT comes with a small diagnostic tool via apt-get and its sub-command check . The diagnostic tool updates the package buffer and checks whether there are damaged or unfulfilled dependencies on the system. The diagnosis is performed on all of the packages that have been installed, as well as those that have been decompressed but not yet configured. Listing 10 displays diagnosis results with no outstanding issues.

Listing 10

apt-get check

# sudo apt-get check
Reading Package lists... Finished
Building Dependency Tree.
Reading in status information.... Finished

The commands dpkg --audit and apt-cache unmet perform similar operations. The latter displays a summary of all unfulfilled dependencies in the package cache. If you add one or two package names, then apt-cache correspondingly limits the search. For an example of this, see Listing 11, which limits the search to the wireshark package. The output also contains recommendations for packages that have not yet been installed.

Listing 11

apt-cache unmet

$ apt-cache unmet "wireshark*"
Wireshark package Version 1.8.2-5wheezy10 has one unmet dependency:
 Replaces: ethereal (< 1.0.0-3)
Libwireshark2 package Version 1.8.2-5wheezy10 has one unmet dependency:
Replaces: wireshark-common (< 1.4.0~rc2-1)
Libwireshark-data package Version 1.8.2-5wheezy10 has one unmet dependency:
 Replaces: wireshark-common (< 1.4.0~rc2-1)
Wireshark-common package Version 1.8.2-5wheezy10 has one unmet dependency:
Replaces: ethereal-common (< 1.0.0-3)
[...]

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