DOKK / manpages / debian 11 / devscripts / build-rdeps.1.en
BUILD-RDEPS(1) BUILD-RDEPS(1)

build-rdeps - find packages that depend on a specific package to build (reverse build depends)

build-rdeps package

build-rdeps searches for all packages that build-depend on the specified package.

The default behaviour is to just `grep` for the given dependency in the Build-Depends field of apt's Sources files.

If the package dose-extra >= 4.0 is installed, then a more complete reverse build dependency computation is carried out. In particular, with that package installed, build-rdeps will find transitive reverse dependencies, respect architecture and build profile restrictions, take Provides relationships, Conflicts, Pre-Depends, Build-Depends-Arch and versioned dependencies into account and correctly resolve multiarch relationships for crossbuild reverse dependency resolution. (This tends to be a slow process due to the complexity of the package interdependencies.)

Run apt-get update before searching for build-depends.
Use sudo when running apt-get update. Has no effect if -u is omitted.
Select another distribution, which is searched for build-depends.
Ignore contrib and non-free
Ignore the given component (e.g. main, contrib, non-free).
Restrict the search to only the specified origin (such as "Debian").
Print the value of the maintainer field for each package.
Explicitly set the host architecture. The default is the value of `dpkg-architecture -qDEB_HOST_ARCH`. This option only works if dose-extra >= 4.0 is installed.
Explicitly set the build architecture. The default is the value of `dpkg-architecture -qDEB_BUILD_ARCH`. This option only works if dose-extra >= 4.0 is installed.
Ignore Build-Depends-Indep or Build-Depends-Arch while looking for reverse dependencies.
Force the old simple behaviour without dose-ceve support even if dose-extra >= 4.0 is installed. (This tends to be faster.)

Notice, that the old behaviour only finds direct dependencies, ignores virtual dependencies, does not find transitive dependencies and does not take version relationships, architecture restrictions, build profiles or multiarch relationships into account.

Don't print meta information (header, counter). Making it easier to use in scripts.
Run the debug mode
Show the usage information.
Show the version information.

The tool requires apt Sources files to be around for the checked components. In the default case this means that in /var/lib/apt/lists files need to be around for main, contrib and non-free.

In practice this means one needs to add one deb-src line for each component, e.g.

deb-src http://<mirror>/debian <dist> main contrib non-free

and run apt-get update afterwards or use the update option of this tool.

This code is copyright by Patrick Schoenfeld <schoenfeld@debian.org>, all rights reserved. This program comes with ABSOLUTELEY NO WARRANTY. You are free to redistribute this code under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later.

Patrick Schoenfeld <schoenfeld@debian.org>

2021-08-18 Debian Utilities