DPKG-GENBUILDDEPS(1)

💖 DPKG-GENBUILDDEPS 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the dpkg-genbuilddeps era of your life ✨ this lil cutie lives in the General Commands Manual, and she is genuinely so useful, no cap 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

dpkg-genbuilddeps — generate a list of packages used to build this package 👑

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

dpkg-genbuilddeps [arg ...]

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so like, this program is a wrapper around dpkg-depcheck(1) 💅 you run it from the top of a Debian build tree, okay? and what it does is it calls dpkg-buildpackage with whatever arguments you handed it on the command line, and then — this is the main character part — it traces the execution</> of that build and figures out which non-essential packages got used while the package was building 🔥

why do you care? because this is lowkey perfect for figuring out what your Build-Depends control fields should actually say 🌈 obsessed.

now, bestie, real talk — it does NOT tell you which packages were used for the arch independent parts of the build versus the arch dependent parts, and it also does not attempt to figure out which versions of packages are required 😭 so don't come for her about that, that's just not her job.

the good news? she should be totally able to run under fakeroot instead of being run as root, either like:

fakeroot dpkg-genbuilddeps

or like:

dpkg-genbuilddeps -rfakeroot

either one slays 🎀

one thing though — this program requires the build-essential package to be installed. if it's not, pls just use dpkg-depcheck directly instead, with a command like:

dpkg-depcheck --all dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -b -rfakeroot ...

and honestly? all this program itself actually does is essentially run the command:

dpkg-depcheck -b dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -b -rfakeroot [arg ...]

like that's it. that's the whole vibe. she's a wrapper and she knows it 💅✨

👀 SEE ALSO 👀

• dpkg-depcheck(1)
• fakeroot(1)
• The Debian Policy Manual, sections on Build-Depends etc. 📚

🫶 AUTHOR 🫶

the original dpkg-genbuilddeps was written by Ben Collins <bcollins@debian.org> 💖 the current version is a simple wrapper around dpkg-depcheck written by Bill Allombert <ballombe@debian.org> ✨ and this manual page was written by Julian Gilbey <jdg@debian.org> 🎀

and that's the whole page, bestie!! this one shipped under DEBIAN in the Debian Utilities collection — go forth and trace your builds, you absolute icon 👑💜