On 2025-12-29 at 09:39, Jörg-Volker Peetz wrote: > aptitude might help you in this case. > > To find all packages recommended, for example, by apt call > > aptitude -F "%M%a %p %v# %V#" search '~i~Rrecommends:^apt$' > > it shows the installed version of the package(s) and the version the package > can > be upgraded to. > For upgrading all packages recommended by apt call > > aptitude install '~U~Rrecommends:^apt$' > > The "^" and "$" characters indicate that just the recommendations for the > package beginning with apt and ending with apt are to be considered.
Wouldn't that just result in initiating an explicit 'install' action on
the Recommends:'ed packages, though?
I can already do that; I already know what the packages involved are for
the all-installed-packages case (because 'apt-get dist-upgrade' tells
me, after I've finished with the manually-installed-packages upgrades),
and if I wanted to pull out just the ones from a particular package,
have multiple ways to potentially do that (including the one you
suggest), although doing it recursively down the dependency chain would
be harder.
The trouble is that (as I referenced in the parenthetical final
paragraph of my initial post) carrying out an explicit 'install' action
on an automatically-installed package also causes - or at least used to
cause, and I haven't seen any notice that this has changed - it to be
marked as manually installed. By contrast, having such a package be
upgraded because of a (versioned) dependency from another package does
not affect its install-type state.
Identifying which packages need to be upgraded is not the difficulty
here. Getting apt (etc.) to upgrade them piecemeal (as distinct from
doing it en-masse, via 'dist-upgrade' or the like), without having it
also change that marking state, is what I'm trying to figure out.
Ideally I'd prefer to be able to say
# apt-get upgrade-dependencies <packagename>
or similar, and have all packages down the dependency chain (with
Depends: and Recommends: included or not depending on the setting of the
install-recommended-packages configuration option) be upgraded to the
most eligible available version, with the same eligibility criteria that
would be used when installing <packagename> in the first place, or when
running 'apt-get dist-upgrade'.
I suppose in principle I could script something that would do
for every package specified:
get all its dependencies, recursively (respecting that config)
for every package specified or gotten:
if it has a newer eligible version showing as available:
check whether it is marked as manually installed
upgrade it
if it was not marked as manually installed:
explicitly set it as automatically installed
but some parts of that look like they would be a *pain* to implement in
the scripting languages I have available (the eligibility checking in
particular, since I'd basically have to implement some form of handling
for the package-source priorities reported by e.g. 'apt-cache policy'),
and I'd really rather not go to that much trouble if there's already a
way to achieve the end result with less my-end complexity.
--
The Wanderer
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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