auto-apt and apt-file

In one of my previous articles I had described the APT option to install all the packages required for a particular source code to compile. This is sufficient when one is installing standard packages, however what about missing files in case of your own source code or some non-standard application?

Case in point:: Missing include files in a particular source code.

One of the easiest methods for doing this (other than installing all packages whose name starts with lib) is using another great APT utility called “auto-apt” and the other option is finding the file and installing the right package using “apt-file”.

auto-apt works great out of the box but is a bit of an overkill. However a few annoying bugs like this (is this really a bug) make the use of this great utility a big pain. But as always there are ways around everything.

The problem described in the above bug revolves around the fact that apt-file is unable to downland Contents-arch.gz from the archives and make a database. To overcome this we can use the -c|–cache option of apt-file nad point it to the auto-apt database.

$sudo apt-file -c /var/cache/auto-apt/ search

Another way around is to copy all the auto-apt database into apt-files default location.

/var/cache/auto-apt$ sudo cp * /var/cache/apt/apt-file/

Now you are free to use auto-apt or apt-file as you want.