mjhjmtu

This is a followup question to my former question apt-rdepends does not show multiarch information.

With that problem solved, I've now encountered the issue that apt-cache will recurse over all alternatives for a dependency:

$ apt-cache depends --recurse --no-recommends --no-suggests --no-breaks --no-suggests --no-replaces --no-conflicts --no-pre-depends nano 
nano
 Depends: libc6
 Depends: libncursesw5
 Depends: libtinfo5
 |Depends: dpkg
 dpkg:i386
 Depends: install-info
 install-info:i386
libc6
 Depends: libgcc1
libncursesw5
 Depends: libtinfo5
 Depends: libc6
 Recommends: libgpm2
libtinfo5
 Depends: libc6
dpkg
dpkg:i386
install-info
 Depends: libc6
install-info:i386
 Depends: libc6:i386
libgcc1
 Depends: gcc-4.9-base
 Depends: libc6
libgpm2
 Depends: libc6
libc6:i386
 Depends: libgcc1:i386
gcc-4.9-base
libgcc1:i386
 Depends: gcc-4.9-base:i386
 Depends: libc6:i386
gcc-4.9-base:i386

This currently blows up my package list by about 300%.

Any suggestions on how to force it to use only the preferred alternatives (in the example: not the i386 packages)?

Had the same issue. I found that one can use

-o APT::Cache::ShowOnlyFirstOr=true

which solves a bit of the problem, however not completely - for example when you
have multiarch and the same package is provided in both architectures (i.e not OR but actually two packages that can be used), then you get recursion on both.

I guess I should warn you that this option does not seem to be documented
anywhere. Also, I do not know if the prefered option is always first.

(See how 'ShowOnlyFirstOr' is used in
https://salsa.debian.org/apt-team/apt/blob/master/apt-private/private-depends.cc )