Following the chain of dependencies

[Markus Schönhaber]

Brian McKee:

> I was surprised to learn that installing apticron on a server would
> drag in x11 !

Not for me (on a Jaunty server with no GUI installed):
| # LANG=C aptitude -s install apticron
| Reading package lists... Done
| Building dependency tree
| Reading state information... Done
| Reading extended state information
| Initializing package states... Done
| The following NEW packages will be installed:
|   apt-listchanges{a} apticron
| 0 packages upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
| Need to get 77.0kB of archives. After unpacking 623kB will be used.
| Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?]

> What's the best way to follow the chain of dependencies and figure out why?

I don't know of a general automatic way of following such a chain of
dependencies - maybe others can come up with one.
Manually, you can do something like
aptitude show <package name>
or
apt-cache depends <package name>
to see the direct dependencies of a package (synaptic probably has such
a functionality too).

One of apticron's dependencies is debconf which, in turn, suggests
gnome-utils. Did you configure apt to automatically install suggested
packages?

-- 
Regards
  mks