Tuesday·26·November·2013
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.
Tagged as: alias, apt-show-versions, aptitude, awk, CLI, Debian, filter, grep, one-liner, Package Management, Quoting, UUUCO
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