  Package managers provide ease of access to applications by removing the
time-consuming and sometimes completely prohibitive barrier of successfully
building, installing, and maintaining the software for a system. A package
dependency contains dependencies between all packages required to build and run
the target software. Package management system developers, package maintainers,
and users may consult the dependency graph when a simple listing is
insufficient for their analyses. However, users working in a remote command
line environment must disrupt their workflow to visualize dependency graphs in
graphical programs, possibly needing to move files between devices or incur
forwarding lag. Such is the case for users of Spack, an open source package
management system originally developed to ease the complex builds required by
supercomputing environments. To preserve the command line workflow of Spack, we
develop an interactive ASCII visualization for its dependency graphs. Through
interviews with Spack maintainers, we identify user goals and corresponding
visual tasks for dependency graphs. We evaluate the use of our visualization
through a command line-centered study, comparing it to the system's two
existing approaches. We observe that despite the limitations of the ASCII
representation, our visualization is preferred by participants when approached
from a command line interface workflow.
