Looking for equivalent features to Debian's aptitude

knghtbrd · 2024-05-15 08:02:09

Hi all,

I've always been a Debianite despite a couple of forays into both Gentoo and Arch for specific systems over the years (ahh the bad old days when random systems' ACPI was not well-su—MORE not well-supported and UEFI was the distant future…), but it's both been awhile now, and a search tells me that I would probably still be missing an equivalent of aptitude for Arch.

This program serves several purposes: Informs you of new packages' existence (discussed previously on the forum with the suggestion to look into RSS feeds), allows you to examine and sort out optional and alternative dependencies for a program, view changelogs of packages before installing them or upgrading on a per-package basis, and most importantly it's a TUI that runs from a terminal or over ssh.

I suspect a comparable tool does not exist, and the suggestion of rss to keep track of new packages does potentially solve part of this depending on what I find for RSS readers—it's been a minute since I've used RSS honestly. ? But the other tasks—seeing the changes to the packages I'm about to install and having a way to stage upgrades/installations and see what I'm doing before I do it … those things seem to be the parlance only of GUI tools from the AUR on Arch, and something I read suggests they might not do things the same way pacman would? Unsure on that. GUIs and I have at best a love/hate relationship—I'm legally blind and more comfortable with a MASSIVE FONT in a terminal and a keyboard than anything with a mouse.

Anyway, suggestions and useful discussion about these things for a "n00b" would be appreciated. ?

jl2 · 2024-05-15 08:17:24

Informs you of new packages' existence => pacman -Ss <packagename>
allows you to examine and sort out optional and alternative dependencies for a program => pacman will tell you if a optional depencies are available, but you still have to install them with pacman -S --asdeps packagename
view changelogs of packages before installing them => nope, gotta do that yourself
or upgrading on a per-package basis => partial updates are not supported by arch linux, always update with -Syu OR with -Sy THEN -Su

You might be interested in paru (in the AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/paru)
just run 'paru <SearchString>', it will give you a interactive search
most importantly It will also manage AUR packages for you.

Last edited by jl2 (2024-05-15 08:18:31)

mukl · 2024-05-15 08:48:15

knghtbrd wrote:

Informs you of new packages' existence

There is checkupdates https://man.archlinux.org/man/extra/pac … dates.8.en

knghtbrd · 2024-05-15 09:55:32

jl2 wrote:

or upgrading on a per-package basis => partial updates are not supported by arch linux, always update with -Syu OR with -Sy THEN -Su

I'm aware of this, except you just above that told me to do precisely otherwise:

jl2 wrote:

allows you to examine and sort out optional and alternative dependencies for a program => pacman will tell you if a optional depencies are available, but you still have to install them with pacman -S --asdeps packagename
view changelogs of packages before installing them => nope, gotta do that yourself

Obviously you intended that whatever else you plan to do needs to involve a pacman -Syu to update the rest of the system. That's fair, but my point was that aptitude permits batching all of these things to be done at once. You spend a few moments working out what you want done (with the program telling you this means that as you go) and once you're done, you hit go and go make a sandwich or something.

It doesn't seem there's a terminal-based solution for that. A couple GUIs, sure, but nothing for the terminal at this time. At some point when I'm a little more settled I might have to ask around and see if anybody else even wants such a thing. I'll want to spend some time with GUI tools to look at how they work and see if we want to follow that pattern or not. The idea of also keeping track of AUR and flatpak stuff is interesting as well, but I'd rather not get too far ahead of myself as I'm already dangerously close to volunteering myself for a new project, and I've got enough of those already just now.

jl2 wrote:

You might be interested in paru (in the AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/paru)
just run 'paru <SearchString>', it will give you a interactive search
most importantly It will also manage AUR packages for you.

mukl wrote:

There is checkupdates https://man.archlinux.org/man/extra/pac … dates.8.en

I'll investigate both tools, they sound useful.

jl2 · 2024-05-22 18:51:27

You might be interested in pacolog, just found it today: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman … ogs_easily

so you could do something like:

#!/bin/bash

get_paco() {
	dd=$(pacolog $1 2>/dev/null)
	echo "$1: ${dd:none}"
}

pacman -Sy
for i in $(pacman -Quq); do
	get_paco $i &
done
for i in $(jobs -p); do
	wait $job
done
read -p "accept? (enter)"
pacman -Su

pacolog is a little slow, so I parallelized it. Too bad it can't handle custom repos, else I'd be uing it too.

Arch Linux

#1 2024-05-15 08:02:09

Looking for equivalent features to Debian's aptitude

#2 2024-05-15 08:17:24

Re: Looking for equivalent features to Debian's aptitude

#3 2024-05-15 08:48:15

Re: Looking for equivalent features to Debian's aptitude

#4 2024-05-15 09:55:32

Re: Looking for equivalent features to Debian's aptitude

#5 2024-05-22 18:51:27

Re: Looking for equivalent features to Debian's aptitude

Board footer