which-pkg-broke.1

.\" which-pkg-broke.1 - find which package might have broken another
.\" Copyright (C) 2006 Javier Fernandez-Sanguino
.\" Everybody is allowed to distribute this manual page,
.\" to modify it, and to distribute modified versions of it.
.TH which-pkg-broke 1 "July 24 2006" "debian\-goodies" "debian\-goodies"
.SH NAME
which-pkg-broke \- find which package might have broken another
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B which-pkg-broke 
.RI package
.SH DESCRIPTION
The
.B which-pkg-broke 
program will retrieve a list of the named package and all its dependencies
sorted by the time they were installed on the system (as determined
from the mtime information of 
.B /var/lib/dpkg/info/*.list
\). 

This tool makes it possible for a system admin to obtain information that might
correlate installation of package dependencies with a package breakage in order
to find which package update might be responsible for the breakage.

.SH EXAMPLES
This tool can be useful determine which package dependencies were upgraded
more recently and might be associated with the bug that is being observed.
For example, if aptitude stops working properly, an administrator can run:

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

So depending on exactly when the misbehaviour started, there may be a reason to
point the finger at a more-recently updated library like \fBlibstdc++\fP or
\fBlibncurses\fP, which are more-recently installed than
aptitude itself.


.SH SEE ALSO
.BR rc\-alert (1)

.SH AUTHOR
.B 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.