APT-LISTCHANGES(1) Debian APT-LISTCHANGES(1)
NAME
apt-listchanges - Show new changelog entries from Debian package
archives
SYNOPSIS
apt-listchanges [[options...]] {[--apt] | [package.deb...]}
DESCRIPTION
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.
OPTIONS
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.
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.
--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.
--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.
--select-frontend
Choose frontend interactively. This option is mainly for testing
purposes, please do not use it.
AUTOMATIC FRONTEND OVERRIDE
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:
o the standard output is not connected to terminal;
o 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';
o the --assume-yes (-y) option is given to apt-get(8);
o 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.
CONFIGURATION FILE
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.
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".
Example1.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.
ENVIRONMENT
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).
FILES
/etc/apt/listchanges.conf
Configuration file.
/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.
AUTHOR
apt-listchanges was written by Matt Zimmerman <mdz@debian.org>
The current maintainer is Robert Luberda <robert@debian.org>
SEE ALSO
sensible-pager(1), sensible-browser(1), apt-get(8), aptitude(8)
apt-listchanges 2017-07-08 APT-LISTCHANGES(1)