{"id":9671,"date":"2018-05-30T11:56:30","date_gmt":"2018-05-30T09:56:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.b.shuttle.de\/hayek\/hayek\/jochen\/wp\/blog-en\/?p=9671"},"modified":"2018-05-30T11:56:30","modified_gmt":"2018-05-30T09:56:30","slug":"dpk-query-un","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.jochen.hayek.name\/blog-en\/2018\/05\/30\/dpk-query-un\/","title":{"rendered":"dpk-query: why are certain packages being shown as &#8220;un &#8230;   (no description available)&#8221;?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t\t<strong>Solution<\/strong>: Some other package depends on this package, but only optionally resp. as an alternative; of the alternatives &#8230; one is indeed installed, but not this one, but still this is gets listed.<\/p>\n<p>This is how the package first showed up:<\/p>\n<pre>$ dpkg-query --list foo...\nDesired=Unknown\/Install\/Remove\/Purge\/Hold\n| Status=Not\/...\n|\/ Err?=(none)\/...\n||\/ Name Version Architecture Description\n+++-======================-================-================-...\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline\">un<\/span> foo___________________ &lt;none&gt; &lt;none&gt; (no description available)<\/pre>\n<p>I have that package &#8220;foo&#8230;&#8221;\u00a0 being displayed as <em>Unknown<\/em> (Desired) and <em>Not<\/em> (Status).<\/p>\n<p>I am rather keen to know, why it gets listed at all.<\/p>\n<p>I cannot find the right dpkg* command to tell me, which package depends on foo&#8230; .<\/p>\n<p>This is sort of a &#8220;raw command&#8221; to help me:<\/p>\n<pre>$\u00a0fgrep --before 10 foo... \/var\/lib\/dpkg\/status<\/pre>\n<p>Update 2018-05-30:<\/p>\n<p>This command line (almost) does, what I expect:<\/p>\n<pre>$ apt-rdepends --reverse foo... # the \"r\" in \"rdepends\" stands for \"recursive\"<\/pre>\n<p>The quirk is, that the dependency in fact is only optional resp. <span style=\"text-decoration: underline\">alternative<\/span> (this is the reason, why the package is not installed), but this fact does not get displayed.<\/p>\n<p>This command line does <span style=\"text-decoration: underline\">not<\/span>, what I expect:<\/p>\n<pre>$ apt-cache rdepends foo... # the \"r\" in \"rdepends\" stands for \"reverse\"<\/pre>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/manpages.debian.org\/unstable\/apt-rdepends\/apt-rdepends.1.en.html\">https:\/\/manpages.debian.org\/unstable\/apt-rdepends\/apt-rdepends.1.en.html<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Solution: Some other package depends on this package, but only optionally resp. as an alternative; of the alternatives &#8230; one is indeed installed, but not this one, but still this is gets listed. This is how the package first showed up: $ dpkg-query &#8211;list foo&#8230; Desired=Unknown\/Install\/Remove\/Purge\/Hold | Status=Not\/&#8230; |\/ Err?=(none)\/&#8230; ||\/ Name Version Architecture Description [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[769,306,412],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-debian","category-linux","category-package-management"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paO0kP-2vZ","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.jochen.hayek.name\/blog-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.jochen.hayek.name\/blog-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.jochen.hayek.name\/blog-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.jochen.hayek.name\/blog-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.jochen.hayek.name\/blog-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wp.jochen.hayek.name\/blog-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9671\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.jochen.hayek.name\/blog-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.jochen.hayek.name\/blog-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.jochen.hayek.name\/blog-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}