Following the chain of dependencies

[Brian McKee]

2009/5/7 Markus Schönhaber <ubuntu-users at list-post.mks-mail.de>:
>> 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):
>> 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>
> One of apticron's dependencies is debconf which, in turn, suggests
> gnome-utils. Did you configure apt to automatically install suggested
> packages?
Nope

Hmmm - maybe I'm getting what's going on here

==> aptitude show apticron
State: not installed
Depends: apt-listchanges (>= 2.59), mailx, debconf | debconf-2.0,
iproute, apt (>= 0.6.8)

Assuming it takes the first fork

==> aptitude show mailx
Package: mailx
State: installed

==> aptitude show debconf
Package: debconf
State: installed

==> aptitude show apt-listchanges
State: not installed
Depends: apt (>= 0.5.3), debconf | debconf-2.0, debianutils (>=
2.0.2), python (>= 2.4), python-apt, python-support (>= 0.7.1), ucf
(>= 0.28)
Recommends: exim4 | mail-transport-agent, python-glade2, python-gtk2
Suggests: www-browser, x-terminal-emulator

For some reason it thinks if you don't have exim4 (I'm running
postfix) you need the python GUI stuff, which I'm guessing leads back
to x11 if you chase if far enough.
I wonder why?

I also have since determined that aptitude -D seems to show
dependencies, but it's not very legible.

So, I have a solution that seems to work - sudo aptitude -R install apticron...

Thanks for prodding me along.

Brian