Re: aptitude new packages list forgets old

[Sven Joachim <svenjoac@gmx.de>]

On 2019-07-08 19:21 +0200, Matus UHLAR - fantomas wrote:

> I am trying to look which packages are new in buster that were not in
> stretch. I am using aptitude since it't great tool for browsing packages.

Beware that the list of new packages in buster is way too large to
browse casually.  In main alone there are over 13,000 new binary
packages!

> until now it was easy:
>
> do 'f'orget new packages in aptitude
> change sources.list to point to new release
> do 'u'pdate packages list
> ... voila
>
> but now, when I do this, aptitude seems to forget all info about packages
> previously available.

Indeed.  I have seen this before, also when switching mirrors in
sources.list.  I seems that aptitude somehow forgets about the
previously available packages before it sees the one from the new
repository, which could be called a bug.

> What do I wrong? Thanks

I don't think you did actually anything wrong, since what you did ought
to work.  To work around that, you could do either:

- run "apt update" rather than aptitude after you changed sources.list,
  or

- _add_ an entry for the new release in sources.list rather than
  replacing the current one (you may remove the old entry later).

If you want to actually do that now, you need to point back your
sources.list to stretch temporarily and run
"aptitude update && aptitude forget-new" before proceeding with one of
the above suggestions.

HTH,
    Sven