whypkg

Canonical: gitlab.com/safteinzz/whypkg · Mirror: github.com/safteinzz/whypkg

why the hell is this package here? 🕵️

A fast, cross-distro package investigator for apt, pacman, dnf and flatpak. Fuzzy-find anything installed and find out: did you install it, or did something drag it in?

cargo install whypkg

Browse everything

[M] you installed it · [A] something pulled it in · [F] flatpak app · ↑ upgrade waiting

Type to fuzzy-filter. It searches descriptions too, so visual studio finds code and element finds im.riot.Riot. Tab cycles all / manual / auto / flatpak.

Open a package and get the answer

pulled in by clang. That is the whole point of the tool. You also get what it came installed alongside, whether it came from a repo or a local file you sideloaded (or a repo that no longer exists), what needs it, and what it needs. Press Enter on anything in the list to follow the thread, Esc to come back.

See the neighbourhood

Press Ctrl-G on any package for a live dependency graph, drawn in the terminal. No browser, no image protocol, works over ssh and inside tmux.

hjkl or the arrows to move between planets, Enter to re-centre on one and keep digging, Esc to retrace your steps.

Know what an upgrade is about to pull down

whypkg pending --quick

Every package with an upgrade waiting, and why it is on your system. Pipe it, grep it, diff it before and after.

Commands

whypkg                 # browse every installed package
whypkg --upgradable    # browse only packages with an upgrade waiting
whypkg pending         # full report, grouped by what pulled things in
whypkg pending --quick # one line per package: size + reason
whypkg update          # update whypkg itself

whypkg pending also takes --kernel, --apps, --auto and --sizes to show one section at a time.

Distro support

Flatpak apps show up alongside your system packages when flatpak is installed. Each package manager lives behind a single Backend trait, so the analysis and the UI are distro-agnostic.

It never touches your system

whypkg only reads. It will not sync, install or remove anything. Upgrade lists reflect your last database refresh (apt update, pacman -Sy, dnf makecache), the same way your package manager's own "what can be upgraded" listing does.

Why it is fast

Everything loads once at startup into an in-memory graph, so every hop while you browse is a hash-map lookup rather than a subprocess. The slow part is your package manager's own queries (about half a second), not whypkg.

It started life as the bash apt-why / apt-pending scripts, kept in legacy/.

License

AGPL-3.0-only.