[arch-general] Advanced pacman dependency functions

[bardo]

Hi all.

I was looking for a way to do a couple of things with pacman that may
be useful, mainly for package maintainers. Maybe they can already be
done and I just didn't find out how. I used to use pt-deptree, but it
hasn't been working for quite some time now.

The first one is finding all the packages that directly depend on a
specific package, even if they're not installed. This came to my mind
considering those upgrades which break other software, like x264 and
tcl/tk (8.5 has just been released): it could be a lot easier to test
if all packages work properly with the new version or if it is
necessary to rebuild them.

Second, I often find myself looking for package dependencies along the
tree, because I need to know, given two packages, if one of the two
depends on the other or not. This is good when I'm deciding which
dependencies should be put in a package, becuase the cycle
edit-makepkg-namcap is sometimes impractical when the package has a
lot of dependencies.

Is anybody able to help?

TIA,
Corrado