bgstack15 wrote:

Apt list --upgradable shows me a different list than what apt-get upgrade -V does.

Is this partly due to the difference between apt-get upgrade and apt-get dist-upgrade? (or apt upgrade and apt full-upgrade)

No, I don't think the differences between those different upgrade commands matters. I think "apt list --upgradable" does not do the full dependency resolution to determine that no, oddjob-mkhomedir is not actually upgradable; it will be held back.

Apt list --upgradable shows me a different list than what apt-get upgrade -V does.

Is this partly due to the difference between apt-get upgrade and apt-get dist-upgrade? (or apt upgrade and apt full-upgrade)

I suppose, in this context that using -V may be more accurate, in that it shows what it is actually about to do, rather than what it could potentially do, depending on which version of the command you later give.

Geoff

Geoff

My messing around with awk had produced really weird results, where the y/n prompt would occur, but the last ~50 lines of text including the prompt text would only appear after my response.

So now I am going to go read the man page to see if I can get it to show me, on those individual lines, what repo each package is coming from. I realize that's auxiliary to the main purpose of this thread, but it is a continuation of the thought that I totally haven't read the man page for apt-get.

@Head_on_a_Stick solved it. That's good enough. Wow. Apparently I didn't read the right man pages or right sections of the man pages. This -V is such a game-changer.

edit: Showing the version numbers is even a nice bonus!

Flag

 -V, --verbose-versions 

show full versions for upgraded and installed packages.

empty@E485:~ $ sudo apt upgrade -V
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages will be upgraded:
   libruby2.5 (2.5.5-3 => 2.5.5-3+deb10u1)
   ruby2.5 (2.5.5-3 => 2.5.5-3+deb10u1)
   ruby2.5-dev (2.5.5-3 => 2.5.5-3+deb10u1)
   ruby2.5-doc (2.5.5-3 => 2.5.5-3+deb10u1)
4 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 6,402 kB of archives.
After this operation, 1,024 B disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

Show off!

#1

edit: Showing the version numbers is even a nice bonus!

empty@E485:~ $ sudo apt upgrade -V
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages will be upgraded:
   libruby2.5 (2.5.5-3 => 2.5.5-3+deb10u1)
   ruby2.5 (2.5.5-3 => 2.5.5-3+deb10u1)
   ruby2.5-dev (2.5.5-3 => 2.5.5-3+deb10u1)
   ruby2.5-doc (2.5.5-3 => 2.5.5-3+deb10u1)
4 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 6,402 kB of archives.
After this operation, 1,024 B disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

Is that the sort of thing you are after?

Geoff

apt install apt-show-versions

The following command will show each package that can be upgraded on a single line...along with version numbers.

apt-show-versions -u

However, it still may be confusing.  

So, you might try this. It will list each package that can be upgraded on a single line, but no version numbers...

apt-show-versions -u | cut -d: -f1

...or do as golinux said, and upgrade through synaptic...which shows the available upgrades for each package on a single line.

$ apt-cache pkgnames | awk '{ print length,$0 }' | sort -n | tail
53 ruby-rails-assets-markdown-it--markdown-it-for-inline
54 libmono-system-windows-forms-datavisualization4.0a-cil
55 libmoosex-traitfor-meta-class-betteranonclassnames-perl
55 libperl-critic-policy-variables-prohibitlooponhash-perl
56 libcatalyst-authentication-credential-authen-simple-perl
56 libcatalyst-plugin-authentication-credential-openid-perl
58 node-babel-plugin-transform-es3-member-expression-literals
59 libmono-system-runtime-serialization-formatters-soap4.0-cil
60 librust-wasm-bindgen+xxx-debug-only-print-generated-code-dev
60 node-babel-helper-builder-binary-assignment-operator-visitor

If the filenames may be on one line like in apt-cache policynode-babel-helper-builder-binary-assignment-operator-visitor , it may be somewhat readable:

$ apt-cache policy node-babel-helper-builder-binary-assignment-operator-visitor
node-babel-helper-builder-binary-assignment-operator-visitor:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 6.26.0+dfsg-3
  Version table:
     6.26.0+dfsg-3 500
        500 http://deb.devuan.org/merged beowulf/main armhf Packages

Simple post processing of apt-get upgrade's output from ^The following packages will be upgraded:$ to the end of the indented block following it would be no big deal. Maybe just throwing it as one line at apt-get policy $THAT_LINE would give a lot of version information, but sometimes more than one "candidate" for a package will show up and how do we know which one apt-get will choose?

Post processing a dry run of the upgrade process may be a way?

I currently have no deb-ish system with updates waiting to be installed, so no easy way to look at a dry run's output. :-(

 | sed "/^  /{s/\\b /\n  /g}"

to the command. That merely "pretty-prints" and doesn't provide the version details.