---
name: "which-pkg-broke-build"
section: "1"
platform: "linux"
package: "debian-goodies"
version: "0.88.2"
release: "Debian 13 (Trixie)"
platforms: ["linux"]
url: "https://new.carta.tech/which-pkg-broke-build"
---

# which-pkg-broke-build(1)

find which package might have broken another package's build

## NAME

which-pkg-broke-build - find which package might have broken another package's build

## SYNOPSIS

**which-pkg-broke-build** \[.\]\
 **which-pkg-broke-build** *\<source-directory\>*\
 **which-pkg-broke-build** *\<source-package\>*

## DESCRIPTION

The **which-pkg-broke-build** program will retrieve a list of all (recursive) build-dependencies of the named package sorted by the time they were installed on the system (as determined from the mtime information of **/var/lib/dpkg/info/\*.list** .

This tool allows a package developer to obtain information that might correlate installation of package build-dependencies with a package build breakage in order to find which build-dependency update might be responsible for the breakage.

## PARAMETERS

If there's a parameter and it's an existing directory, **which-pkg-broke-build** assumes that this is an unpacked Debian source package and looks for its build-dependencies.

If there's a parameter and it's not an existing directory, **which-pkg-broke-build** assumes that it's a source package name and looks for that source package's build-dependencies.

If there's no parameter, **which-pkg-broke-build** assumes that the current directory contains an unpacked Debian source package and looks for its build-dependencies.

## BUGS

**which-pkg-broke-build** is horribly slow and inefficient as it calls **which-pkg-broke** once for each explicit build-dependency (and once for the package build-essential). It hence checks packages which are dependencies of multiple explicit build-dependencies also multiple times.

## SEE ALSO

**[which-pkg-broke(1)](/which-pkg-broke/1.md)**

## AUTHOR

**which-pkg-broke-build** was written by Axel Beckert \<abe@debian.org\>