Debian Sid and Apt: Keep Track of Package Changes

July 23, 2005 2-minute read

Since Debian/Sid, which I am using on my primary box, is now switching over to X.org and GCC 4.0 there are a few broken dependencies right now which could cause troubles. I do not always have the time to read the Debian mailing list (which you actually should if you are using unstable) and therefore I find apt-listbugs and apt-listchanges quite useful.

Here is a short description:

marc@mydebian:~$ apt-cache show apt-listbugs
Package: apt-listbugs
Priority: optional
Section: admin
Installed-Size: 360
Maintainer: Masato Taruishi <taru@debian.org>
Architecture: all
Version: 0.0.49
Depends: ruby (>= 1.8), libruby1.8 (>= 1.8.1), libdpkg-ruby1.8, apt, 
libzlib-ruby1.8, libintl-gettext-ruby1.8, libxml-parser-ruby1.8
Suggests: reportbug, debianutils (>= 2.0) | www-browser | w3m
Filename: pool/main/a/apt-listbugs/apt-listbugs_0.0.49_all.deb
Size: 70866
MD5sum: 0088b6abe0a91de2e17a7f0e7fb9d887
Description: Lists critical bugs before each apt installation
 apt-listbugs is a tool which retrieves bug reports from the Debian
 Bug Tracking System and lists them. Especially, it is intended to
 be invoked before each upgrade/installation by apt in order to check
 whether the upgrade/installation is safe.
 .
 Many developers and users prefer the unstable version
 of Debian for its new features and packages.  apt, the
 usual upgrade tool, can break your system by
 installing a buggy package.
 .
 apt-listbugs lists critical bug reports from the Debian
 Bug Tracking System.  Run it before apt to see if
 an upgrade or installation is known to be unsafe.

and

marc@mydebian:~$ apt-cache show apt-listchanges
Package: apt-listchanges
Priority: optional
Section: utils
Installed-Size: 164
Maintainer: Matt Zimmerman <mdz@debian.org>
Architecture: all
Version: 2.59-0.2
Depends: python (>= 2.3), apt (>= 0.5.3), python-apt, debconf, 
ucf (>= 0.28), debianutils (>= 2.0.2)
Suggests: x-terminal-emulator, www-browser
Filename: pool/main/a/apt-listchanges/apt-listchanges_2.59-0.2_all.deb
Size: 55972
MD5sum: 1de69b9835b422ff3b7ddef47a0c750f
Description: Display change history from .deb archives
 apt-listchanges is a tool to show what has been changed in a new
 version of a Debian package, as compared to the version currently
 installed on the system.  It does this by extracting the relevant
 entries from the Debian changelog file, and the NEWS.Debian file.
 .
 It can be run on several .deb archives at a time to get a list of all
 of the changes that would be effected by installing or upgrading a
 group of packages.  It can be configured to do this automatically
 during upgrades using apt.

So we are able to view all bugs in packages which would be updated during an apt-get upgrade.

apt-get upgrade --just-print | awk '/^Inst/ {print $2}' | 
   xargs apt-listbugs list