RepoExplorer

A set of utilities for exploring Debian package repositories

The following utilities are available:

• RepoList

  List and optionally check a repository's contents

• DependencyRoots

  Calculate a minimal set of packages on your system that is sufficient to install all the other currently-installed packages via dependency

Further utilities will be added later.

Using

Run each utility with --help for a detailed description of how to use it.

Installing

Debian/Ubuntu

Locally-built binaries

On Debian/Ubuntu, most of the build dependencies exist as pre-built OS packages. The build process is:

sudo apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \
	ghc cabal-install \
	libghc-{cmdargs,cryptohash,debian,fgl,missingh,curl,feed,tagsoup,xml}-dev

cabal update
cabal install --installdir=/usr/local/bin --install-method=copy

You can set --installdir to any convenient place that's on your PATH.

You can find the definitive list of build dependencies in debian/control, omitting debhelper, haskell-devscripts and cdbs, which are needed only for building packages, and libghc-download-curl which is no longer a system package and is installed using cabal.

Locally-built package

You may find a Debian/Ubuntu package called repoexplorer in an unofficial repo somewhere. However, it's easy to build your own:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \
	devscripts fakeroot haskell-debian-utils \
	libwww-perl file git

git submodule update --init

cd haskell-download-curl
origtargz -u
sudo apt-get-build-depends -y
debuild -b -us -uc
debuild -- clean
cd ..

sudo dpkg -i libghc-download-curl-dev_*.deb
sudo apt-get-build-depends -y
debuild -b -us -uc
debuild -- clean

This will produce a repoexplorer_*.deb file in the parent directory. Install it with sudo dpkg -i, or sign the changes file with debsign and upload it to a repository with dput.

Since the intermediate package libghc-download-curl-dev is only a build dependency and not a runtime dependency, it doesn't need to be distributed to users of the repoexplorer package.

Note: On older systems the origtargz command may not exist. However, an equivalent shell function can be defined like this:

origtargz()
{
	uscan --download-current-version --rename
	tar -xf ../*.orig.tar.gz --strip-components=1
}

Source package

If you want to build packages in a cleanroom environment such as pbuilder, you can create source packages by omitting the apt-get-build-depends commands and using debuild -nc -S -sa -us -uc instead of debuild -b -us -uc (although make sure your working directory is clean first).

You'll need to make the libghc-download-curl-dev binary available when building repoexplorer.

NixOS

There's a default.nix in the top-level directory, so to build binaries, run:

nix-build

The binaries will then be available via result/bin.

To make repoexplorer installable as a package on your system, add the following to ~/.nixpkgs/config.nix:

{
  packageOverrides = pkgs:
  {
    repoexplorer = pkgs.callPackage ../path/to/RepoExplorer {};
  };
}

Then install it with:

nix-env -f '<nixpkgs>' -iA repoexplorer

Building from source on any platform

First you need some basic Haskell development tools installed. The easiest way to do this is to install ghcup.

To build the dependent Haskell libraries, you'll need various C/C++ tools and libraries that they use. On Mac, they're all included with the command-line development tools. On Debian/Ubuntu, they can be installed with:

sudo apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \
	gcc lib{c,z,bz2,curl4-openssl}-dev

On Windows you may be able to install them using Cygwin.

Run cabal --version to see which version you have, and then use the corresponding set of commands below.

It takes a while to build the dependencies, but the build itself is relatively short. The cabal build tool can install the binaries to a directory of your choosing.

Cabal 3.x or later

Then execute the following commands:

cabal update
cabal build -j
cabal install --installdir=/usr/local/bin --install-method=copy

Cabal 2.x

Then execute the following commands:

cabal v2-update
cabal v2-build -j
cabal v2-install --installdir=/usr/local/bin --install-method=copy

Cabal 1.x

Then execute the following commands:

cabal sandbox init
cabal update
cabal install -j --only-dependencies
cabal build -j
cabal install --bindir=/usr/local/bin
cabal sandbox delete