Showing packages newer than in archive with aptitude //at 22:14 //by abe

I happens quite often that I install a manually built, newer version of some package on a machine. Occassionally I forget to remove it or to downgrade it to the version in the APT repo.

$ apt-show-versions | fgrep newer

easily finds those packages.

But usually when doing such a check, I want this list of packages in my aptitude TUI to have a look at the other versions of that package and to take actions. And I don’t want to manually search for each of the package manually.

This can be done with the following “one-liner”:

# aptitude -o "Aptitude::Pkg-Display-Limit=( `apt-show-versions | fgrep newer | awk -F '[ :]' '{printf "~n ^"$1"$ | "}' | sed -e 's/| *$//'` )"

It uses apt-show-version’s output, searches for the right packages, takes the first column and transforms it into an aptitude search pattern matching all packages whose name is exactly one of the listed packages.

But this solution is quite ugly and slow. So I wondered if this is also doable with pure aptitude search patterns which likely would also be faster.

And after some playing around I found the following working aptitude search term:

~i ?any-version(!~O.) !~U !~o

This matches all packages which which are installed and which have a version which has no origin, i.e. no associated APT repository. Since this also matches all hold packages as well as all packages not available in any archive, I use !~U !~o to exclude those packages from that list again.

Since nobody can remember that nor wants to type that everytime needed, I added the following alias to my setup:

alias aptitude-newer-than-in-archive='aptitude -o "Aptitude::Pkg-Display-Limit=~i ?any-version(!~O.) !~U !~o"'

Only caveat so far:

It seems to also match packages from APT repos which haven’t set an “Origin”. This should not happen with any Debian or Ubuntu APT repository, but seems to happen occasionally with privately run APT repositories.

And using ~A instead of ~O, i.e. ~i ?any-version(!~A.), does not work for this case either, despite it matches installed packages of which versions not in any available archive exist. But unfortunately aptitude seems to remember in some way if a package was in some archive in the past, so this only shows packages installed with dpkg -i, but not packages removed from e.g. unstable but with older versions still being available in stable.

Comments

Re: Showing packages newer than in archive with aptitude

Posted by:	Stuart
Website:
Time:	Tue, 26 Nov 2013 23:44

Our canned response for this in #debian is:

aptitude search '?narrow(?not(?archive("^[^n][^o].*$")),?version(CURRENT))'

That looks for package versions (not packages -- that's the ?narrow) that don't have "now" as their archive which is an internal apt pseudo-release that all no-origin packages have in the same way as apt-cache policy shows /var/lib/dpkg/status as the origin. [1]

This recipe also behaves itself wrt multiple versions of packages being available such as from the security archive or in a testing/unstable mixed system. I'd need to glare at your search pattern for a while longer to ensure that was the case.

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/579603

Reply

Re: Showing packages newer than in archive with aptitude

Posted by:	Axel
Website:	http://noone.org/blog
Time:	Wed, 27 Nov 2013 00:00

Thanks for the hint about how that pseudo-archive is used. While seeing it regularily it never came to me to match against that. Also thanks for the pointer to that wishlist bug report for making this obviously common quest a simple to use feature.

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