aptitude cli undocumented behaviour [was: aptitude cli options vs. apt-get ...]

[Michael Lange <klappnase@freenet.de>]

Hi,

On Wed, 5 Oct 2016 11:19:52 +0200
Michael Lange <klappnase@freenet.de> wrote:

(...)
> So my question is: is there a way to include updates to packages put on
> hold to the output of "aptitude full-upgrade" as in apt-get, that I have
> been missing, or is this simply not possible?

I looked again at man aptitude and according to the paragraphs about
"safe-upgrade" and "full-upgrade":

   "If no <package>s are listed on the command line, aptitude will attempt
   to upgrade every package that can be upgraded. Otherwise, aptitude will
   attempt to upgrade only the packages which it is instructed to
   upgrade."

I would have expected, that passing the packages put on hold as
arguments, as in 

   aptitude full-upgrade `aptitude -q=2 -F %p search ~U`

would only try to upgrade these. However when I tried a dry-run on my
almost-up-to-date Jessie box here, with a few holds (hplip and friends) I
got the following surprising result (command lines wrapped by sylpheed):

The list of package holds:

# aptitude -q=2 -F %p search ~ahold
hplip                                                                                                                                                             
hplip-data                                                                                                                                                        
hplip-gui                                                                                                                                                         
libhpmud0                                                                                                                                                         
libsane-hpaio                                                                                                                                                     
printer-driver-hpcups  

Available updates that would be installed by default:

# aptitude -y -v -s full-upgrade  | /bin/grep ^Inst | /usr/bin/cut -d\
					-f2 | /usr/bin/sort
libdatetime-timezone-perl
tzdata
tzdata-java

# aptitude -y -v -s full-upgrade `aptitude -q=2 -F %p search ~U`
           | /bin/grep ^Inst | /usr/bin/cut -d\  -f2 | /usr/bin/sort
hplip
hplip-data
hplip-gui
libdatetime-timezone-perl
libhpmud0
libsane-hpaio
printer-driver-hpcups
tzdata
tzdata-java

tzdata and friends obviously don't have anything to do with hplip, so it
looks like the man page isn't telling the truth.
Can anyone confirm this behaviour, did I misinterpret the manpage, or why
does this happen?
Right now this looks like it is exactly what I have been asking for in
the first post, but the manpage seems to contradict...

Regards

Michael

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