Re: Upgrading with APT: which packages is it going to download?

[Torsten Hilbrich <Torsten.Hilbrich@gmx.net>]

On: Thu, 29 Oct 1998 23:21:24 +0100 Enrico Zini writes:
> 
> Hello!
> As my modem internet connection is slow and (being in Italy)
> expensive, I would like to use apt to upgrade my system, but being
> myself the connection using a Zip disk to carry .deb files from our
> debian mirror at the university to home.
> 
> Is there some way to know what is apt going to download, so that I
> can go, fetch them and plug them in?

apt-get --no-act upgrade

tells you the packages (without version number) that apt-get will
download.  You will need some glue to combined the package name with
the filename, a simple exercise for a perl programmer.

	Torsten

BTW: If you are unexperienced in writing such code I could assist you.
Here is some code for slurping in the package files as a start.  Next
you need to call the above comand and print the filename for each
package which is output.

use strict;
use DirHandle;

my $dir = '/var/state/apt/lists';
my %Packages;
my $d = new DirHandle $dir or die "Readdir $dir: $!";
my $file;

while(defined ($file = $d->read)) {
  # Skip stable
  next if $file !~ /unstable/;
  open IN, "<$dir/$file" or die "Read $dir/$file: $!";
  my $package;
  while(<IN>) {
    /^Package: (.*)$/ and $package = $1;
    /^Filename: (.*)$/ and $Packages{$package} = $1;
  }
  close IN;
}

print "$Packages{'3dchess'}\n";
print "$Packages{'gs-aladdin'}\n";