germinate(1)

NAME

germinate - expand dependencies in a list of seed packages

SYNOPSIS

germinate [-S source] [-s dist] [-m mirror] [-d dist,...] [-a arch]
          [-c component,...] [-i] [--bzr] [--no-rdepends]

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 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.

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.

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

-S, --seed-source source,...

Fetch seeds from the specified sources. The default is
http://people.ubuntu.com/~ubuntu-archive/seeds/, or http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-core-dev/ubuntu-seeds/ if the --bzr 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 /home/username/seeds/ -s debian.unstable.

-s, --seed-dist dist

Fetch seeds for distribution dist. The default is ubuntu.intrepid.

-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.

-d, --dist dist,...

Operate on the specified distributions. The default is intrepid.
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.

-i, --ipv6

Check IPv6 status of source packages, using the statistics available at http://debdev.fabbione.net/stat/.

--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.

--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.

--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.

BUGS

The wiki-style markup in seeds was inherited from an early implementation, and is a wart.

germinate can sometimes be confused by complicated situations involving the order in which it encounters dependencies on virtual packages.
Explicit entries in seeds may be required to work around this.

Handling of installer packages (udebs) is complicated, poorly documented, and doesn't always work quite right: in particular, packages aren't
demoted to the supported seed when they should be.

AUTHORS

Scott James Remnant <scott@canonical.com>
Colin Watson <cjwatson@canonical.com>

germinate is copyright © 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 Canonical Ltd. See the GNU General Public License version 2 or later for copying conditions. A copy of the GNU General Public License is available in
/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL.

Ubuntu May 27, 2005 Ubuntu