STRONGDEPS(1)

💖 STRONGDEPS 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the strongdeps manual page, straight out of DOSE Tools — yes it's a real section 1 man page and yes it's about to be your new obsession 💅

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✨ NAME ✨

strongdeps — indentify the strong dependency of a set of packages

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

strongdeps [option] ... file ...

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so like, strongdeps computes the strong dependencies and the impact set of a set of packages. and the definition here is literally the whole vibe:

we say that p strongly depends on q if whenever p is installed then q must also be installed. no cap. 🫶

and the impact set of a package q is the set of all packages p that strongly depend on q. that's it, that's the whole thing, and it's giving main character energy fr fr.

📥 Input Specification 📥

input files have to contain stanzas in the format of deb-control(5), separated by one blank line. for instance, the Packages files as found on a Debian mirror server, or in the directory /var/lib/apt/lists/ of a Debian system, are suitable as input. ✨

the repository used in the analysis consists of the union of all packages from the input files. (yes, all of them, combined, together, one big pile 🎀)

📤 Output Specification 📤

the output of strongdeps is a CSV table containing strong dependencies, impact set and direct dependencies.

if the option --checkonly is spefified, strongdeps prints on standard output the list of the packages that strong depends on each of the given packages.

if --checkonly if paired with --dot then strongdeps prints on standard output the detransitivitazed graph of the strong dependencies of each package in dot format. 🦋

N.B. Since --checkonly computes only the strong dependencies of a set of packages, the impact set is not computed. 💀

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

• --checkonly package[,package] ... — specifies a list of packages to check. by default all packages are checked. --checkonly and --table are mutually exclusive, so pick a lane bestie 😤
• --dot — print the strong dependency graph in dot format
• --table — print the table (package,strong,direct,difference) in the file data.csv
• --detrans — perform the transitive reduction of the strong dependency graph. this option is implied by --checkonly
• --transitive-closure — perform the transitive closure of the direct dependency graph
• --conj-only — use the conjunctive graph only
• -v — enable info / warnings / debug messages. this option may be repeated up to three times in order to increase verbosity. (stack it like it's a combo, but max three, okay? 🔥)
• --progress — display progress bars. we love a loading bar, it's so satisfying 🌈
• -h, --help — display this list of options.

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⭐ EXAMPLE ⭐

 strongdeps --dot --checkonly "2ping,libc6" \
 deb:///var/lib/apt/lists/ftp.fr.debian.org_debian_dists_sid_main_binary-amd64_Packages

 strongdeps --table \
 deb:///var/lib/apt/lists/ftp.fr.debian.org_debian_dists_sid_main_binary-amd64_Packages

look at that second one go — --table mode, straight into data.csv. iconic. 👑

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👑 AUTHORS 👑

Pietro Abate, Jaap Boender, Roberto Di Cosmo

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

<http://www.mancoosi.org> is the home page of the Mancoosi project. 🎀

for a comprehensive explanation of the notion of strong dependency and impact set see:

Strong Dependencies between Software Components, by Pietro Abate, Jaap Boender, Roberto Di Cosmo, and Stefano Zacchiroli. <http://mancoosi.org/reports/>

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okay that's the whole page bestie, you're officially a strong-dependency girlie now. this was DOSE Tools' strongdeps(1), dated 2025-07-24 — go forth and compute your impact sets, mwah 💖✨🎀🦋