DOKK / manpages / debian 13 / devscripts / chdist.1.en
CHDIST(1) CHDIST(1)

chdist - script to easily play with several distributions

chdist [options] [command] [command parameters]

chdist [options] DIST command [command parameters]

The second syntax is accepted when the DIST does not match one of the known commands from the list below (see "COMMANDS"). Then the command may be any program available on the system and anything based on apt will be using the DIST apt data.

chdist is a rewrite of what used to be known as 'MultiDistroTools' (or mdt). Its use is to create 'APT trees' for several distributions, making it easy to query the status of packages in other distribution without using chroots, for instance.

Provide a usage message.
Choose data directory (default: ~/.chdist/).
Choose architecture (default: `dpkg --print-architecture`).
Display version information.

Prepare a new tree named DIST
Run apt inside DIST
Run apt-get inside DIST
Run apt-cache inside DIST
Run apt-file inside DIST
Run apt-rdepends inside DIST
Run build-rdeps inside DIST. When the DIST origin and suite/codename differ from the system origin and suite/codename then they need to be set using build-rdeps options.
Run aptitude inside DIST
List binary packages for SRCPKG in DIST
List source package for BINPKG in DIST
List versions of packages in several DISTributions
Same as compare-packages/compare-bin-packages, but also runs dpkg --compare-versions and display where the package is newer.
Compare sources and binaries for DIST
Same as compare-src-bin-packages, but also run dpkg --compare-versions and display where the package is newer
Run grep-dctrl on *_Packages inside DIST
Run grep-dctrl on *_Sources inside DIST
List available DISTs

This program is copyright 2007 by Lucas Nussbaum and Luk Claes. This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.

It is licensed under the terms of the GPL, either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

2025-08-15 Debian Utilities