Debian Package Management – List Installed Software Robustly

I don't know of a one-stop command line solution, although all the tools exist (apt-cache depends --installed, apt-cache rdepends --installed --recurse, apt-mark showmanual, dpigs, etc.). It would be possible to hack together a command line script that could attempt to find large packages with few manually installed reverse dependencies. Here's the proof of concept I used as a starting point:

dpigs | awk 'NR == 1 {print $2}' | xargs apt-cache rdepends --installed --important --recurse | awk '!/:/ {print $1}' | sort -u

On the other hand, if you want to do complex analysis of the graph in multiple directions (e.g., what set of manually installed packages has the largest on-disk overlapping set of recursive dependencies), it can quickly get out of hand. At that point, you'll probably need to look at something more customizable (awk or python?).

Full Disclosure: I have contributed to the project below. If that kind of thing matters to you, please take it into account. If I were aware of a similar project that were already in the Debian repositories, I would probably post that instead.

While I prefer to do everything from the command line, you might find pacgraph (also on github) a useful alternative. It was originally written by Kyle Keen for Arch Linux, but it's now compatible with deb- and rpm- based systems as well. I used to have some sample output from an Ubuntu system, but I can't find it, so here's an example from his web site:

.

It's been a while since I've used it, but I believe there are also flags to highlight a particular package, with different colors for its recursive dependencies and reverse dependencies.

The following python script parse the output of apt-cache policy and generate the list of all installed packages with the output format

Package<tab>Version<tab>Origin<tab>Suite

apt-show-origins

#!/usr/bin/env python

# Should be written with python-apt
# but for now parse the output of apt-cache policy

import os
import re
command    = "apt-cache policy $(dpkg -l | awk '/ii/ {print $2}' )"
stream     = os.popen(command);
content    = stream.readlines()
getOrigin  = False
pkgList    = []

#Parse the output generated by apt-cache
for s in content:
  if(not s.startswith(' ')):
    pkg = type('', (), {})()   #Create an empty object 
    pkg.name = s[:-2]          #Remove trailing ':\n'
  elif(getOrigin):
    pkg.origin = re.split('\s+',s)[2]
    pkg.suite = re.split('\s+',s)[3]
    pkgList.append(pkg)
    getOrigin = False
  elif(s.startswith(' ***')):
    pkg.version = re.split('\s+',s)[2]
    getOrigin = True

#Display the list
for pkg in pkgList:
  print pkg.name    + '\t'\
      + pkg.version + '\t'\
      + pkg.origin  + '\t'\
      + pkg.suite

Notes:

• Contrary as what is said in comments apt-show-versions is still maintained, check the official mailing list. But it can't help because it doesn't output the package's origin.