apt 0.9.12

The recently released apt 0.9.12 contains a bunch of good stuff, bugfixes and cleanups. But there are two new feature I particularly like.

The first is the new parameter “–with-new-pkgs” for the upgrade
command:

# apt-get upgrade --with-new-pkgs

that will install new dependencies on the upgrade but never remove
packages. A typical use-case is a stable system that gets a kernel
with a new kernel ABI package.

The second is “–show-progress” for
install/remove/upgrade/dist-upgrade which will show inline progress
when dpkg is running to indicate the global progress.

# apt-get install --show-progress tea
...
Selecting previously unselected package tea-data.
(Reading database ... 380116 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking tea-data (from .../tea-data_33.1.0-1_all.deb) ...
Progress: [ 10%]
Progress: [ 20%]
Progress: [ 30%]
Selecting previously unselected package tea.
Unpacking tea (from .../tea_33.1.0-1_amd64.deb) ...
Progress: [ 40%]
Progress: [ 50%]
Progress: [ 60%]
Processing triggers for doc-base ...
Processing 2 added doc-base files...
Registering documents with scrollkeeper...
...
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Setting up tea-data (33.1.0-1) ...
Progress: [ 70%]
Progress: [ 80%]
Setting up tea (33.1.0-1) ...
Progress: [ 90%]
Progress: [100%]

For the install progress, there is also a new experimental option
“Dpkg::Progress-Fancy”. It will display a persistent progress status bar in the last terminal line. This works like this:

# apt-get -o Dpkg::Progress-Fancy=true install tea

This kind of information is obviously most useful on complex operations like big installs or (release) upgrades.

Tags: debian, Ubuntu