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  • Thank you very much. I have a large list of packages. So I guess I could run debtree or apt depend against each of them and then somehow unify the results to find a common ancestor. I'm just wondering if someone has already come up with a tool to do this with a collection of packages. I don't want to "re-invent the wheel". Commented Apr 7, 2021 at 16:42
  • PS: apt depend fails: "E: Invalid operation depend". I'm running apt version 2.0.5. But debtree at least works for me. Commented Apr 7, 2021 at 16:47
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    "dot syntax" is actually very nice for this. It's not the most obvious thing to read as a human, but you can feed the output of this into dot (from the graphviz package) to generate a graph in an image. Good answer! Commented Apr 7, 2021 at 16:47
  • Thank you. I'll study graphviz and figure out how to reformat debtree dependency output into something that the dot syntax module understands. Commented Apr 7, 2021 at 16:50
  • Oh, it's not apt depend, but rather, apt-cache depends. That indeed works for me, also. I could also reformat its output for dot. Commented Apr 7, 2021 at 16:53