apt-listchanges(1)



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)

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