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.

Next Debian Meetup in Zurich //at 20:16 //by abe

The first Debian meetup in Zurich last month was quite a success and I look forward to further Debian meetups in Zurich — every first Tuesday of the month.

The next meetup will be

on Tuesday, 2013-Dec-03 starting at 18:30 CET
at St. Gallerhof, Konradstrasse 2, 8005 Zurich

Please note that this is a different location than last month.

Everybody who is interested in Debian is welcome to join us. Registering is not necessary.

There was also some interest in Debian meetups in other Swiss cities, namely Bern and somewhere around Lac Leman. In case you want a Debian meetup elsewhere in Switzerland, too, or if you’re interested in any Debian meetup in Switzerland, feel free to join the Swiss Debian Community Mailing List and help organising other Swiss Debian meetups.