Equivalent of yum check-update

[Jonathan Matthews]

On 9 December 2010 18:24, NoOp <glgxg at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> You can also use 'apt-show-versions -u'. However 'apt-show-versions' is
> not quite as effective as 'aptitude search '?upgradable'' as it doesn't
> show updates for pinned packages, but aptitude search does[1].
>
> [1] I have udisks pinned:
>
> $ sudo aptitude search '?upgradable'
> i A udisks      - abstraction for enumerating block devices
>
> $ sudo apt-show-versions -u
> $

It's good to have both these options but I'd favour the aptitude
version, given that pinning a package so as not to install some future
upgrade is a very explicit action. I'd generally like to know which
packages have upgrades that I haven't already /manually/ excluded.

As an aside (useful for me as I'm coming at this from the PoV of
monitoring # packages upgradable across a large estate of machines,
where the monitoring user isn't root) "aptitude search '?upgradable'"
doesn't need to run via sudo.

Jonathan