Ubuntu Manpage: apt-listchanges - Show new changelog entries from Debian package archives

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 downolad 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:

       •   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.

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 the 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 "header", 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.

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>