How would you know all dependencies needed for source installations?

chutsu · 01-16-2009, 05:20 PM

Hi
Just a rather stupid question, Just for fun, I'm attempting to code my own package manager that would install packages from source.

If you were to install something quite large from source, where or how would you work out the all the dependencies without actually doing the ./configure step, I mean most of the times the README doc don't really list out all the dependencies. Is there a website or a source where it keeps track of all these software dependencies?
Thanks
Chris

weibullguy · 01-16-2009, 06:57 PM

In short, no, there is no website that keeps track of all the dependencies for every package. I like to use http://gentoo-portage.com/ to find the Gentoo ebuild script for a package. The ebuild script will have a list of dependencies.