Justin B Rye wrote on Thu, Jan 09, 2020 at 12:02:19 +0000: > Andrei POPESCU wrote: > > The long form is quite self-explanatory, the short form is easier to > > type. > > > > Maybe both should be mentioned? > > Remember it's currently > > Below there are two methods for finding installed packages that did > not come from Debian, using either aptitude or apt-forktracer. Please > note that neither of them are 100% accurate (e.g. the aptitude example > will list packages that were once provided by Debian but no longer > are, such as old kernel packages). > > $ aptitude search '~i(!~ODebian)' > $ apt-forktracer | sort > > Adding a second version of the aptitude search would mean breaking it > up with a bit of extra explanation. I'd stick to one version, but I > don't know which I'd vote for.
If it's an either/or question, I'd vote for the long-hand spelling because it's self-documenting. Someone who doesn't know aptitude will understand the long form but not the short form. Someone who knows the short form will understand the long form, but someone who doesn't know aptitude, or who only knows the long form, won't understand the short form. Furthermore, the docs could point to aptitude's manual, table 2.3 (in stretch; it may have been renumbered since then). > Incidentally, I've always been slightly annoyed by that claim that > "aptitude search" isn't 100% accurate. Given that the point of > section 4.2 is to check that you're running pure Debian updated to the > latest stable point release, the fact that it tells you about legacy > kernels seems like a feature, not a bug. I agree that it is a feature, but nevertheless I think it is worth clarifying that the results list packages that are not *today* available for download from deb.debian.org, even if they had been available in the past, otherwise new sysadmins who read the upgrade notes might see the kernel package in the output and wonder if they'd been running a third party kernel. Cheers, Daniel
