# What's the weather like in Debian?

One of the cool things developed during [EDOS](http://www.edos-project.org) (now
[Mancoosi](http://www.mancoosi.org)) has been
[`edos-debcheck`](http://packages.debian.org/sid/edos-debcheck). Using it it is
possible to check (incredibly quickly) whether some package in a given
distribution cannot be installed according to its dependencies. When there are
such packages it usually means that the distro is buggy  s it is shipping
uninstallable packages (there are some corner cases, but they are rare).

In fact, `edos-debcheck` has been run daily (as a service maintained by
[Ralf](http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=treinen)) on Debian's main
suites and some derivatives for years now. The resulting [list of uninstallable
packages](http://edos.debian.net/edos-debcheck/) is linked from
<http://edos.debian.net> and is being used by the QA team; I've no idea if it is
being used by the Release Managers too, but it probably should be.

A cool toy built on top of `edos-debcheck` was the *[Debian
weather](http://brion.inria.fr/anla/)* (part of a more generic service called
Anla, I'll blog about it sooner or later ...). Debian weather basically used to
present the status of a given Debian-based distro in term of how many
uninstallable packages were shipped using the weather metaphor: the fewer the
uninstallable packages, the better the weather. I wrote "used to" because Anla
was stopped about 1 year ago, and is being re-engineered these days.

In the meantime it was a pity not to have the Debian weather (as
[Enrico](http://www.enricozini.org/blog/pdo.html) pointed out with me), so I
spent some time to resurrect it on top of [`edos-debcheck` daily
runs](http://edos.debian.net/edos-debcheck/): **[Debian
weather](http://edos.debian.net/weather/) is back**, enjoy!

[[tag lang/english planet/debian mancoosi qa debian]]