germinate - Online in the Cloud

PROGRAM:

NAME

germinate — expand dependencies in a list of seed packages

SYNOPSIS

germinate [-v] [-S source] [-s dist] [-m mirror] [-d dist,...] [-a arch] [-c component,...]
[--vcs={auto|bzr|git}] [--no-rdepends] [--no-installer]

DESCRIPTION

germinate is a program to help with the maintenance of large software distributions. It
takes a list of seed packages and a mirror of the distribution, and produces outputs with
the seed packages and their dependencies and build-dependencies expanded out in full.

Seeds
The contents of the Ubuntu distribution, and others, are managed by means of seeds. At
their simplest, these are lists of packages which are considered important to have in the
main component of the distribution, without explicitly listing all their dependencies and
build-dependencies.

Seed lists are typically divided up by category: a base or minimal seed might list the core
set of packages required to make the system run at all, while a desktop seed might list the
set of packages installed as part of a default desktop installation. germinate takes these
seeds, adds their dependency trees, and produces an output for each seed which contains a
dependency-expanded list of package names. These outputs may be handed on to archive
maintenance or CD-building tools.

Some seeds may inherit from other seeds: they rely on those seeds to be installed. For
example, a desktop seed will typically inherit from a minimal seed. germinate understands
these inheritance relationships. If a package in the desktop seed depends on ‘foo’, but
‘foo’ is already part of the minimal seed or dependency list, then ‘foo’ will not be added
to the desktop output.

Seeds are stored in text files downloaded from a given URL. Lines not beginning with ‘ * ’
(wiki-style list markup) are ignored.

Seed entries may simply consist of a package name, or may include any of the following
special syntax:

% Seed entries beginning with ‘%’ expand to all binaries from the given source
package.

[...] Seed entries may be followed with ‘ [arch1 arch2 ...]’ to indicate that they should
only be used on the given architectures, or with ‘ [!arch1 !arch2 ...]’ to indicate
that they should not be used on the given architectures.

(...) Seed entries in parentheses indicate that the seed should be treated as a
recommendation of metapackages generated from this seed, rather than as a
dependency.

! Seed entries beginning with ‘!’ cause the given package to be blacklisted from the
given seed and any seeds from which it inherits; this may be followed by ‘%’ as
above to blacklist all binaries from the given source package. Note that this may
result in uninstallable packages whose dependencies have been blacklisted, so use
this feature sparingly. The purpose of a blacklist is to make it obvious when a
package that is not supposed to be installed ends up in germinate's output, so that
package relationships can be fixed to stop that happening. It is not intended for
the purpose of working around buggy package relationships, and attempts to do so
will not work because apt has no way to know about blacklist entries in seeds.

key: value
Some seeds also contain headers at the top of the file, in “key: value” format. For
the most part, these are not parsed by germinate itself. The Ubuntu tasksel package
uses keys beginning with ‘Task-’ to define fields of similar names in its .desc
files. germinate-update-metapackage(1) uses some of these headers to reduce the
need for fragile configuration; see its documentation for further details.

A STRUCTURE file alongside the seeds lists their inheritance relationships. It may also
include lines beginning with ‘include’, causing other collections of seeds to be included as
if they were part of the collection currently being germinated, or lines beginning with
‘feature’, which set flags for the processing of seeds. The only flag currently defined is
‘follow-recommends’, which causes germinate to treat Recommends fields as if they were
Depends. (Features may also be set on a per-seed basis using lines beginning with
‘ * Feature:’ in the seed file; here, ‘no-follow-recommends’ is also supported to allow
Recommends-following to be turned off for individual seeds.)

Build-dependencies and ‘supported’
There is typically no need for a default desktop installation to contain all the compilers
and development libraries needed to build itself from source; if nothing else, it would
consume much more space. Nevertheless, it is normally a requirement for the maintainers of
a distribution to support all the packages necessary to build that distribution.

germinate therefore does not add all the packages that result from following build-
dependencies of seed packages and of their dependencies (the “build-dependency tree”) to
every output, unless they are also in the seed or in the dependency list. Instead, it adds
them to the output for the last seed in the STRUCTURE file, conventionally called supported.

Like any other seed, the supported seed may contain its own list of packages. It is common
to provide support for many software packages which are not in the default installation,
such as debugging libraries, optimised kernels, alternative language support, and the like.

Outputs
The output files are named after the seed to which they correspond. An additional output
file is needed for supported, namely ‘supported+build-depends’, which contains the supported
list and the build-depends lists of the other seeds all joined together. An ‘all’ output is
produced to represent the entire archive.

Some other files are produced for occasional use by experts. See the README file for full
details on these.

OPTIONS

-v, --verbose
Be more verbose when processing seeds.

-S, --seed-source source,...
Fetch seeds from the specified sources. The default is
http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-archive/seeds/, or
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-core-dev/ubuntu-seeds/ if the --vcs=bzr option is
used, or git://git.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-core-dev/ubuntu-seeds/+git/ if the --vcs=git
option is used. You may use file:// URLs here to fetch seeds from the local file
system; for example, if your seeds are stored in /home/username/seeds/debian.unstable,
then you would use the options -S file:///home/username/seeds/ -s debian.unstable.

-s, --seed-dist dist
Fetch seeds for distribution dist. The default is ubuntu.xenial.

When fetching seeds from git, the part after the rightmost ‘.’ character, if any, is
treated as the branch name to check out; this rather strange style is for backward
compatibility.

-m, --mirror mirror
Get package lists from mirror. The default is http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/. May
be supplied multiple times; the newest version of each package across all archives
will win.

--source-mirror mirror
Get source package lists from mirror. The default is to use package lists mirrors.
May be supplied multiple times; the newest version of each source package across all
archives will win.

-d, --dist dist,...
Operate on the specified distributions. The default is xenial. Listing multiple
distributions may be useful, for example, when examining both a released distribution
and its security updates.

-a, --arch arch
Operate on architecture arch. The default is i386.

-c, --components component,...
Operate on the specified components. The default is main.

--vcs={auto|bzr|git}
Check out seeds from a version control system rather than fetching them directly from
a URL. Requires bzr or git, as appropriate, to be installed. For bzr, use the branch
found at seed-source/seed-dist; for git, remove the part after the rightmost ‘.’
character of seed-dist and use it as the branch name to check out from
seed-source/remainder-of-seed-dist. For auto, guess the version control system to use
from seed-source (trying both in ambiguous cases) and then proceed as above.

--bzr
Check out seeds from the bzr branch found at seed-source/seed-dist rather than
fetching them directly from a URL. Requires bzr to be installed. This option is
deprecated and is retained for backward compatibility; use --vcs=bzr instead.

--no-rdepends
Disable reverse-dependency calculations. These calculations cause a large number of
small files to be written out in the rdepends/ directory, and may take some time.

--no-installer
Do not consider debian-installer udeb packages. While generally not the desired
outcome, sometimes you might wish to omit consideration of installer packages when
processing your seeds, perhaps if sending the output directly to the package manager
on an already-installed system.

--seed-packages parent/pkg,...
Treat each pkg as a seed by itself, inheriting from parent (i.e. assuming that all
packages in the parent seed are already installed while calculating the additional
dependencies of pkg). This allows the use of germinate to calculate the dependencies
of individual extra packages. For example, --seed-packages desktop/epiphany-browser
will create an epiphany-browser output file listing the additional packages that need
to be installed over and above the desktop seed in order to install epiphany-browser.

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