apt-depends

apt-depends allows you to keep track of manually installed deb packages on your system. This is especially useful when installing dependencies for software that is not packaged as a deb itself. With apt-depends you no longer need to install those packages independently (marked as "manual"). You can easily create and install a metapackage that has the required dependencies.

Example of use

$ apt-depends install pyenv-dependencies build-essential libssl-dev zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev \
libreadline-dev libsqlite3-dev wget curl llvm libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev \
xz-utils tk-dev libffi-dev liblzma-dev python-openssl git

The above command will create an empty metapackage with the name pyenv-dependencies and install it. All words after the new package name are names of packages the pyenv-dependencies will depend on and that will be automatically installed by as well, if they are not present on the system already.

This results in:

• A single new package pyenv-dependencies that is marked as manually installed
• All other packages will be marked as automatically installed

In this example the packages mentioned are required to run the excellent python development tool pyenv (link) on Ubuntu. pyenv is not available by default as a deb package. Installing the packages using apt-get or apt will also do the job, but will mark each package as manually installed, making it harder to identify and remove them if you don't need them anymore.

Current status

apt-depends is not yet working. It's a small project I'm building in my off-hours to learn more python and to make something I would use myself.