which-pkg-broke-build(1)

💖 which-pkg-broke-build — the detective era 💖

ok so bestie, welcome to the debian-goodies manual for which-pkg-broke-build(1). this is the little tool that plays detective when a build randomly explodes and you're standing there like 🧍♀️ "who did this to me". no cap, it's giving forensic accountant energy and i am obsessed.

✨ NAME ✨

which-pkg-broke-build — find which package might have broken another package's build 🔍💅

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

which-pkg-broke-build [.]
which-pkg-broke-build <source-directory>
which-pkg-broke-build <source-package>

three whole ways to call her, and she serves in all of them 🫶

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

okay so here's the vibe. which-pkg-broke-build goes and grabs a list of all the (recursive) build-dependencies of whatever package you named, and it sorts them by the time they were installed on your system. and how does it know when they were installed? it peeks at the mtime info in /var/lib/dpkg/info/*.list. that's the receipt, bestie 🧾✨

so what's this actually for? literally this: if you're a package developer and your build suddenly broke, this tool hands you info that might correlate the installation of your build-dependencies with the breakage. translation: it helps you figure out which build-dependency update is the one that did this to you. main character detective work fr fr 🔥

✨ PARAMETERS ✨

• if there's a parameter and it's an existing directory, she assumes that's an unpacked Debian source package and goes looking for its build-dependencies. 🎀
• if there's a parameter and it's not an existing directory, she assumes it's a source package name and goes looking for that source package's build-dependencies. 🦋
• if there's no parameter at all, she assumes the current directory holds an unpacked Debian source package and goes looking for its build-dependencies. 💜

no notes. she's adaptable. she's flexible. she's everything 💅

✨ BUGS ✨

okay so we have to talk about it 😭 which-pkg-broke-build is horribly slow and inefficient. why? because she calls which-pkg-broke once for each explicit build-dependency (and once more for the package build-essential). the consequences? if some packages are dependencies of multiple explicit build-dependencies, she will check those same packages multiple times. yeah. she's thorough to a fault. she's doing the most, literally. 💀

✨ SEE ALSO ✨

• which-pkg-broke(1)

✨ AUTHOR ✨

which-pkg-broke-build was written by Axel Beckert <abe@debian.org> 👑

and that's the whole page, bestie! this one comes to you from the debian-goodies package, dated December 11 2016. oldie but a goodie, as they say. go forth and find out which package ruined your build 🫶🌸✨