Debian package dependency browser

The Debian package browser is great but it is somewhat limited. As an example even though you can get dependencies and build dependencies for any package but not reverse dependencies (i.e. list all packages that depend or build-depend on this package).

I wrote a simple program that downloads the package repository file, parses it and creates an SQLite DB with all the link information and a simple Flask web app to browse it. This is what it looks like when showing the information page on Flex.

In addition you can do all sorts of analysis on the data. As an example here are the 20 packages that are depended on the most followed by the number of packages that depend on them:

libc6 19759

libstdc++6 6362

libgcc1 5814

libglib2.0-0 2906

python 2802

zlib1g 2620

libcairo2 1410

libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 1385

libpango-1.0-0 1303

libpangocairo-1.0-0 1139

libqt5core5a 1122

libatk1.0-0 1075

libgtk2.0-0 1010

libxml2 979

libfreetype6 976

perl 880

libqt5gui5 845

libfontconfig1 834

python3 825

libqtcore4 810

And here is the same for build-dependencies:

debhelper 27189

cdbs 3130

dh-autoreconf 3098

dh-python 2959

pkg-config 2698

autotools-dev 2331

python-setuptools 2193

python-all 1888

cmake 1643

python3-setuptools 1539

dpkg-dev 1446

python3-all 1412

perl 1372

zlib1g-dev 1317

dh-buildinfo 1303

python 1302

libglib2.0-dev 1133

gem2deb 1104

default-jdk 1078

libx11-dev 973

The numbers are not exact because the parser is not perfect but as rough estimates these should be reliable. Just don't use them for anything requiring actual accuracy, ok?

The code is here. I probably won't work on it any more due to other obligations, but feel free to play around with it if you wish.