xbps-tree

A fast CLI utility for visualizing dependency trees of xbps packages, written in Rust.

Features

• Show full dependency tree for any installed package
• Show reverse dependencies (who depends on a package)
• Display package versions
• Detect and mark already-seen packages with [*]
• Limit tree depth
• Parallel dependency resolution via rayon
• Colored terminal output

Installation

git clone https://github.com/yourname/xbps-tree
cd xbps-tree
cargo install --path .

Usage

# Show dependency tree
xbps-tree curl

# Limit depth
xbps-tree curl --depth 2

# Show reverse dependencies
xbps-tree curl --reverse

# Hide already-seen packages
xbps-tree curl --no-cycles

Output

curl 8.20.0_1
├── ca-certificates
│   ├── openssl
│   │   ├── glibc 2.41_1
│   │   ├── libcrypto3 3.6.2_1
│   │   │   └── glibc 2.41_1 [*]
│   │   └── libssl3 3.6.2_1
│   └── run-parts
├── glibc 2.41_1 [*]
├── libcurl 8.20.0_1
│   └── ...
└── zlib 1.2.3_1 [*]

24 unique packages

Symbol	Meaning
[*]	Package already shown above, dependencies not expanded

Options

Flag	Description
--depth <N> / -d <N>	Limit tree depth (default: 99)
--reverse / -r	Show reverse dependencies
--no-cycles	Hide already-seen packages

Project structure

src/
├── main.rs       # CLI interface, argument parsing
├── dep.rs        # Dep struct (name + version)
├── provider.rs   # PackageProvider trait
├── xbps.rs       # XbpsProvider — runs xbps-query, parses output
├── tree.rs       # Tree building, parallel dependency collection
├── output.rs     # Terminal output formatting
└── error.rs      # Error types

Architecture

The project is built around a PackageProvider trait:

pub trait PackageProvider: Sync {
    fn deps(&self, pkg: &str) -> Result<Vec<Dep>, XbpsError>;
    fn rdeps(&self, pkg: &str) -> Result<Vec<Dep>, XbpsError>;
    fn version(&self, pkg: &str) -> Result<Option<String>, XbpsError>;
}

Tree building is split into two phases:

1. Collect — parallel traversal via rayon, builds a HashMap<String, Vec<Dep>>
2. Build — constructs the tree from the collected map

This separation makes the code testable (via FakeProvider) and enables parallelism in phase 1.

Performance

xbps-tree firefox  9.73s user 0.92s system 644% cpu 1.652s total

644% CPU — rayon distributes work across all available cores. Without parallelism this would take ~10 seconds.

Dependencies

Crate	Purpose
clap	CLI argument parsing
anyhow	Error handling in application layer
thiserror	Error types
colored	Terminal colors
rayon	Parallel dependency resolution

Requirements

• Void Linux with xbps installed
• xbps-query available in PATH

License

MIT