[Aptitude-devel] Bug#141663: aptitude: new group "New Packages in Woody" like "New Packages" for people using pins

Jö Fahlke jorrit at jorrit.de
Thu Jun 9 11:59:49 UTC 2016


Hi!

Thanks for looking at this.  But you misunderstood what I had been asking.

"~N ~Aunstable" will not select the packages that are "new in unstable".  It
will select the packages that are "new" *and* that are "in unstable" -- which
is something quite different if you have experimental in you sources.list.

Likewise, and much more relevant: "~N ~Atesting" will select "new" *and* that
are "in testing", which is something completely different from "new in
testing" if you have unstable in your sources.list.  If you do weekly reviews,
then "~N ~Atesting" will select almost no packages.  Any package that is in
testing now but wasn't in testing last week almost certainly was in unstable
last week and thus won't be matched by "~N".

I do admit that such a filter would still let through a lot of noise, such as
debug packages and renamed library packages, but those are easy to filter out.
Just do "?new-in(testing) !~slibs !~slibdevel" and you are left with the
packages that you are really interested in to review manually.

Even better would of course be a filter that selects packages whose source
package is new in a given archive -- especially if you might be interested in
new libraries.  It would probably require you to have the appropriate
"deb-src" lines in your sources.list to work.

I am aware that this requires a database that remembers the state of all
packages the last time aptitude was told to forget (key "f" pressed).
Something like that must already exist for "~N" to work -- but I'm quite sure
for "?new-in(...)" to work you would need to keep track of more information
than is beeing done currently.

That beeing said -- I am ok with closing this even though no alternative
exists.  These days I probably would not do weekly reviews to learn of
exciting new packages anyway, so it isn't as relevant as it was.  And no-one
else has expressed a wish for that feature.

Regards,
Jö Fahlke.

-- 
Jorrit (Jö) Fahlke, Institute for Computational und Applied Mathematics,
University of Münster, Orleans-Ring 10, D-48149 Münster
Tel: +49 251 83 35146 Fax: +49 251 83 32729

If God had intended Man to Smoke, He would have set him on Fire.
-- fortune
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