* Martin-Éric Racine [2012-06-09 15:16 +0300]:
> 2012/6/9 Carsten Hey <carsten@debian.org>:
> > You have problems with endless loops because you do not check for
> > already seen packages and deborphan fixes this for you in a proper way
> > so that there is no need to run deborphan in a loop.
>
> No. The loop used to break on multiarch systems because deborphan did
> not produce multiarch-aware content until recently. Even then, this
> only affects Ubuntu's Precise release. No other Debian or Ubuntu
> release is affected.

This multiarch related issue was a symptom of the general problem that
this using this option fixes.


> > You could replace the whole loop with "apt-get remove `deborphan
> > --recursive`".
>
> This is a nice new feature, but it's not backportable, hence why I'll
> stick with my own loops for now.

Actually it is backportable, or rather, it can be written in a way that
works since Ubuntu Natty and Debian Squeeze.

You could check if the option --recursive is present in the system's
deborphan and use this in an if condition.  Anyway, since there is
currently no known problematic package and the multiarch issue is
solved, waiting for post-Wheezy to use a proper deborphan invocation is
fine, but it should in my opinion be done for Wheezy+1.


Checking for an option can be done with the option --check-options:

$ deborphan --check-options --recursive    >/dev/null 2>&1 && echo option is implemented
$ deborphan --check-options --show-section >/dev/null 2>&1 && echo option is implemented
option is implemented

--check-options is only able to check one option reliably, needs to be
the first option itself and output on stdout or stderr might happen.
This restrictions might be removed in future.


Regards
Carsten