The Debian package system has some pretty sweet tools written for it. I came across one of these tools that makes visualizing package depenencies possible. apt-rdepends. You can pass a list of packages to it and it will provide all the dependencies for the packages.
This is cool by itself, but apt-rdepends has an option to output the tree in dotty format. Then using dot, you can create a graphical representation of the tree. I’m included an example image of the LVS dependency tree from my custom Ubuntu image. (more…)