Re: dpkg -l does not report all packages?
On Fri, Sep 21, 2001 at 07:47:51PM -0400, Rick Pasotto wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 21, 2001 at 03:53:35PM -0700, Erik Steffl wrote:
> > Colin Watson wrote:
> > > 'apt-get update' doesn't update dpkg's available file. Use 'dselect
> > > update' instead, which does 'apt-get update' and then merges it with
> > > dpkg's records.
> > >
> > > Also, 'dpkg -l' looks in dpkg's status file, which doesn't necessarily
> > > record all uninstalled packages unless you use dselect on a regular
> > > basis. It'll record installed packages reliably, though.
> >
> > thanks for explanation,
> >
> > is there any way to have correct info about system (installed and
> > available packages and their status) without using deselect?
>
> After reading the above I ran 'dselect update' and found that it works
> just like 'apt-get update' and doesn't go into the normal dselect
> program.
Exactly.
As far as 'dpkg -l' output goes, I don't think anything else necessarily
updates the status file with uninstalled packages. It's not impossible
that dselect might stop doing this in the future, in fact (not that I'm
a dpkg developer), since having a huge status file slows things down a
lot. There are lots of other tools to look at available but not
installed packages, though - you could munge the output of 'dpkg -p
<package>' or grep-available.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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