listing updated packages only

[Panu Matilainen]

On Sun, 11 Jun 2006, Vincent Danen wrote:

> * Gary L. Greene Jr. <greeneg at phoenuxos.com> [2006-06-11 16:10:23 -0400]:
>
>>>>> I was looking for an option in apt-cache or apt-get that would allow me
>>>>> to list packages that apt wanted to update.  For instance, as part of
>>>>> the daily security routine in Annvix, I update the urpmi medium(s) and
>>>>> then report, per-media, what packages are available for upgrade in a
>>>>> cronjob so the admin gets an email saying they're behind on
>>>>> such-and-such packages.
>>>>>
>>>>> I can't seem to find something like this for apt, however.  The closest
>>>>> thing I see is "apt-get upgrade -s" but it's a little messy.  I could
>>>>> clean it up myself by parsing it for the email, but was wondering if
>>>>> there was another option available.
>>>>
>>>> The "simulate" mode (-s) is indeed noisy and occasionally gives nasty
>>>> looking false alerts about conflicts in packages etc. Maybe someday
>>>> somebody will get around to fix it...
>>>
>>> Noisy is ok... false alerts isn't so nice.
>>>
>>>> There's --check-only which .. hmm, doesn't seem to be documented
>>>> anywhere, sigh. Anyway that's probably the closest thing to what you
>>>> want, at the moment at least.
>>>
>>> =)  Well, --check-only looks like it'll do the job nicely with a little
>>> formatting.
>>>
>>> The lua idea is a nice one... might look into that.  Never done anything
>>> with lua before so it might be interesting to try.
>>>
>>> Thanks.
>>
>> Vincent, if you do that, can you please send me the script? I could use that
>> for PhoeNUX's apt-rpm so I can get rid of a LOT of excess code in Pi (package
>> installer) which is an add / remove programs GUI app I'm writing in perl-qt.
>
> The lua script or the shellscript?  The shellscript is being done first
> as that's the one I know I can whip out quickly.  The lua script...
> probably not so quick, although I'll know more once I start looking at
> the other scripts.

What sort of things are we talking about here, exactly? I think a cronjob 
for automatical updates (or "updates available" notifications) are a 
pretty common need.

There's already a crude cronjob for this in contrib/apt-cron but that 
could be enhanced in plenty of ways, including a nicer output for the 
purpose by using a custom lua script etc.

Folks interested in this, could you list your needs in a bit more detailed 
level than "updater / update-checker running from cron" :) Mock output is 
fine, and doesn't matter if it's a bit distro-specific, we can then figure 
out the common needs and find ways to make those distro-specific things 
possible. I should be able to whip out something for this pretty 
quickly... that can be then improved on and included in contrib/ etc.

 	- Panu -