which-pkg-broke(1)

💅 which-pkg-broke — bestie edition ✨

okay so this is which-pkg-broke, part of the debian-goodies collection (yes, the man page header says debian-goodies up top, iykyk 🎀). it's a lil detective tool and honestly? it ate.

🌸 NAME 🌸

which-pkg-broke — find which package might have broken another 🔍💀

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

which-pkg-broke package

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so what this does: you give it a package name, and it pulls up a list of that package and every single one of its dependencies, all sorted by when they were installed on your system. and how does it know when they were installed? it peeks at the mtime info of /var/lib/dpkg/info/*.list — literally the timestamp on those list files. no cap. 🕵️♀️

why do you care? because this is the tool that lets a system admin line up "hey, when did these dependency packages get installed" against "hey, when did stuff start breaking" so they can figure out which package update is the one that broke everything. it's giving correlation, bestie. 👑

🍓 EXAMPLES 🍓

this is so useful for figuring out which dependencies got upgraded recently and might be the culprit behind whatever cursed bug you're staring at. like, say aptitude just stops working right — an admin can run:

$ which-pkg-broke aptitude
Package <libapt-pkg-libc6.3-5-3.3> has no install time info
libdb1-compat                    Fri Aug  8 03:02:11 2003
libsigc++-1.2-5c102              Fri Aug  8 05:15:58 2003
aptitude                         Sun Jan 11 17:38:06 2004
libncurses5                      Sun Jan 18 08:11:05 2004
libc6                            Thu Jan 22 07:55:10 2004
libgcc1                          Tue Jan 27 07:37:22 2004
gcc-3.3-base                     Tue Jan 27 07:37:31 2004
libstdc++5                       Tue Jan 27 07:37:32 2004

(also note: sometimes a package just has no install time info at all — you'll see that line right there at the top, Package <libapt-pkg-libc6.3-5-3.3> has no install time info, and that's just how it is 🙈)

so depending on exactly when the misbehaviour started, you might have a real reason to point the finger at a more-recently-updated library like libstdc++ or libncurses — because those got installed more recently than aptitude itself. sus. very sus. 👀

💜 SEE ALSO 💜

• rc-alert(1)

🫶 AUTHOR 🫶

which-pkg-broke was written by Bill Gribble <grib AT billgribble.com> 💖

this manual page was written by Javier Fernandez-Sanguino for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. 🌈

k that's the whole thing bestie, go catch that bug 👑✨ — this was debian-goodies, page dated July 24 2006, and yes the footer really does say debian-goodies and which-pkg-broke(1) again because man pages love a little encore 💅🎀