apt-listchanges - Show new changelog entries from Debian package
archives
apt-listchanges [[options...]] {[--apt] |
[package.deb...]}
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 both the
NEWS.Debian and changelog[.Debian] files, usually found in
/usr/share/doc/package, from Debian package archives.
Please note that in the default installation if
apt-listchanges is run during upgrades as an APT plugin, it displays
NEWS.Debian entries only. This can be changed with the --which
option.
If changelog entries are displayed and the package does not
contain changelog[.Debian] file, apt-listchanges calls apt-get
changelog command to download the changelog from network. This behavior
can be disabled with the --no-network option.
Given a set of filenames as arguments (or read from apt when using
--apt), apt-listchanges will scan the files (assumed to be
Debian package archives) for the relevant changelog entries, and display
them all in a summary grouped by source package. The groups are sorted by
the urgency of the most urgent change, and than by the package name. Changes
within each package group are displayed in the order of their appearance in
the changelog files, i.e. starting from the latest to the oldest; the
--reverse option can be used to alter this order.
apt-listchanges provides the following options to control
its behavior. Most of them have their equivalent entries in the
configuration file, see the "CONFIGURATION FILE" below for
details.
--apt
Read filenames from a specially-formatted pipeline (as
provided by apt), rather than from command line arguments, and honor certain
apt-specific options in the config file. This pipeline must be in
"version 2" format, specified in the apt configuration.
-v, --verbose
Display additional (usually unwanted) information. For
instance, print a message when a package of the same or older version is to be
installed, or when a package is to be newly installed.
-f, --frontend
Select which frontend to use to display information to
the user. Current frontends include:
pager
Uses
sensible-pager(1) command to display output.
The command uses PAGER environment variable to choose your favourite pager.
The "pager" option may be specified in the configuration file to
select a specific pager for use with apt-listchanges.
browser
Displays an HTML-formatted changelog with hyperlinks for
bugs and email addresses using the
sensible-browser(1) command that
examines BROWSER environment variable to choose your favourite browser. The
"browser" option may be specified in the configuration file to
select a specific browser for use with apt-listchanges.
xterm-pager
Uses your favorite pager to display output, but does so
in an xterm (using the x-terminal-emulator alternative) in the background.
This allows you to go on with the upgrade if you like, and continue to browse
the changelogs. You can override the terminal emulator to be used with the
"xterm" configuration option.
xterm-browser
The logical combination of xterm-pager and browser. Only
appropriate for text-mode browsers.
text
Dumps output to stdout, with no pauses.
syslog
Dumps output to syslog. Disabling the titled option is
recommended.
log
Appends output to a log file, with an optional filter
process. Disabling the titled option is recommended.
mail
Sends mail to the address specified with --email-address,
and does not display changelogs.
gtk
Spawns a gtk window to display the changelogs. Needs
python3-gi to be installed.
none
Does nothing. Can be used to prevent apt-listchanges from
running when configured to run automatically from apt.
Please note that apt-listchanges will try to switch to an
unprivileged user before spawning commands in "browser",
"xterm-browser", and "xterm-pager" frontends. However
this currently does not apply to the "pager" frontend. See also
"ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES" below.
--email-address=address
In addition to displaying it, mail a copy of the
changelog data to the specified address. To only mail changelog entries, use
this option with the special frontend 'mail'.
--email-format={text|html}
If sending mail copies is enabled (see
--email-address above), this option selects whether the mail should be
sent as an old good plain text data (which is the default behavior), or as
html data with clickable links, which might be more convenient for people
using graphical mail clients.
-c, --confirm
Once changelogs have been displayed, ask the user whether
or not to proceed. If the user chooses not to proceed, a nonzero exit status
will be returned, and apt will abort.
-a, --show-all
Rather than trying to display changelog entries that are
newer than the currently installed version of the package, simply display all
changelog entries for all packages. This is useful for viewing the entire
changelog of a .deb before extracting it.
-n, --no-network
In rare cases when a binary package (or to be more
precise: none of the binary packages built from the same source package that
are processed together as a group) does not contain a changelog file,
apt-listchanges by default executes apt-get changelog to
download changelogs from the network servers usually provided by your
operating system distribution. This option will disable this behavior, what
might be useful for example for systems behind a firewall.
--save-seen=file
This option will cause apt-listchanges to keep track of
the last version of a package for which changelogs have been displayed, to
avoid redisplaying the same changelogs in a future invocation. The database is
stored in the named file. Specify 'none' to disable this feature.
--dump-seen
Display the contents of the seen database to standard
output as a list of lines consisting of source package name and its latest
seen version, separated by space. This option requires the path to the seen
database to be known: please either specify it using --save-seen option
or pass --profile=apt option to have it read from the configuration
file.
--since=version
This option will cause apt-listchanges to show the
entries later than the specified version. With this option, the only other
argument you can pass is the path to a .deb file.
--latest=N
This option will cause apt-listchanges to show only the
latest N entries. With this option, the only other argument you can
pass is the path to a .deb file.
--which={news|changelogs|both}
This option selects whether news (from NEWS.Debian et
al.), changelogs (from changelog.Debian et al.) or both should be displayed.
The default is to display only news.
--help
Displays syntax information.
-h, --headers
These options will cause apt-listchanges to insert a
header before each package's changelog showing the name of the package, and
the names of the binary packages which are being upgraded (if there is more
than one, or it differs from the source package name).
--debug
Display some debugging information.
--profile=name
Select an option profile. name corresponds to a
section in /etc/apt/listchanges.conf. The default when invoked from apt is
"apt", and "cmdline" otherwise.
--log=file
Select the file appended to by the log frontend. The
default is /var/log/apt/listchanges.log. The filter command option can be used
to modify the output before it is appended to the log file. Please ensure that
you setup log rotation for this file.
--filter=command
Select the command used to filter output before it is
appended to the log file by the log frontend. stdin will receive the
apt-listchanges output and stdout will be appended to the log file.
Separate arguments with spaces and quote arguments containing spaces. The
command will not be run using the shell unless the shell is included in the
command: sh -c 'date ; cat'
--reverse
Show the changelog entries in reverse order.
--ignore-apt-assume, --ignore-debian-frontend
Disable forcing non-interactive frontend in some of the
cases described in the "AUTOMATIC FRONTEND OVERRIDE" section
below.
--titled, --untitled
Enable or disable the title at the beginning of the
output.
--select-frontend
Choose frontend interactively. This option is mainly for
testing purposes, please do not use it.
For a better integration with existing package management tools,
apt-listchanges tries to detect if package upgrades are done in a
non-interactive way, and automatically switches its frontend to 'text' when
any of the following conditions is satisfied:
•the standard output is not connected to
terminal;
•the
--quiet (
-q) option is given to
apt-get(8) (or
aptitude(8)); note however that when the option
is used more than once, apt-listchanges switches the frontend to 'mail';
•the
--assume-yes (
-y) option is
given to
apt-get(8);
•the DEBIAN_FRONTEND environment variable
is set to "noninteractive", and APT_LISTCHANGES_FRONTED is
not set.
For backward compatibility purposes the last two of the above
checks can be disabled either with "ignore_apt_assume=true" or
"ignore_debian_frontend=true" configuration file entries (see
"CONFIGURATION FILE" below) or by using the command line options:
--ignore-apt-assume or --ignore-debian-frontend.
Please also note that the "mail" frontend is already
non-interactive one, so it is never switched to the "text"
frontend.
Additionally apt-listchanges overrides X11-based frontends
("gtk", "xterm-pager", "xterm-browser") with
"pager" (or "browser" in case of
"xterm-browser") when the environment variable DISPLAY is
not set.
Please note that these silent frontends are not subject to the
overrides: syslog log
apt-listchanges reads its configuration from the
/etc/apt/listchanges.conf. The file consists of sections with names
enclosed in the square brackets. Each section should contain lines in the
key=value format. Lines starting with the "#" sign
are treated as comments and ignored. Files named name.conf in the
/etc/apt/listchanges.conf.d directory are also read in the same way and
override values set in the main configuration file.
Section is a name of profile that can be used as parameter
of the --profile option.
The configuration of the "apt" section can be managed by
debconf(7), and most of the settings there can be changed with the
help of the dpkg-reconfigure apt-listchanges command.
Key is a name of some command-line option (except for
--apt, --profile, --help) with the initial hyphens
removed, and the remaining hyphens translated to underscores, for example:
"email_format" or "save_seen".
Value represents the value of the corresponding option. For
command-line options that do not take argument, like "confirm" or
"headers", the value should be set either to "1",
"yes", "true", and "on" in order to enable the
option, or to "0", "no", "false", and
"off" to disable it.
Additionally key can be one of the following keywords:
"browser", "pager" or "xterm". The
value of such configuration entry should be the name of an
appropriate command, eventually followed by its arguments, for example:
"pager=less -R".
Example 1. Example configuration file
[cmdline]
frontend=pager
[apt]
frontend=xterm-pager
email_address=root
confirm=1
[custom]
frontend=browser
browser=mozilla
The above configuration file specifies that in command-line mode,
the default frontend should be "pager". In apt mode, the
xterm-pager frontend is default, a copy of the changelogs (if any) should be
emailed to root, and apt-listchanges should ask for confirmation. If
apt-listchanges is invoked with --profile=custom, the browser frontend will
be used, and invoke mozilla.
APT_LISTCHANGES_FRONTEND
Frontend to use.
APT_LISTCHANGES_USER, SUDO_USER, USERNAME
The value of the first existing of the above variables
will be used as the name of user to switch to when running commands spawned by
the "browser", "xterm-browser", and
"xterm-pager" frontends if apt-listchanges is started by a
privileged user.
DEBIAN_FRONTEND
If set to "noninteractive", then it can force
apt-listchanges to use non-interactive frontend, see the
"AUTOMATIC FRONTEND OVERRIDE" section for details.
BROWSER
Used by the browser frontend, should be set to a command
expecting a file: URL for an HTML file to display.
PAGER
Used by the pager frontend.
APT_HOOK_INFO_FD
File descriptor to read package names from in the
--apt mode. (Apt is expected to set this variable to a proper file
descriptor number).
/etc/apt/listchanges.conf
Configuration file.
/etc/apt/listchanges.conf.d/*.conf
Configuration file override files.
/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20listchanges
File used for registering apt-listchanges into apt
system.
/var/lib/apt/listchanges.db
Database used for save-seen.
apt-listchanges was written by Matt Zimmerman
<mdz@debian.org>
The current maintainer is Robert Luberda
<robert@debian.org>