On 08/07/2026 3:05 am, Eben King wrote:
On 7/7/26 15:21, Robert Heller wrote:At Tue, 7 Jul 2026 14:18:25 -0400 Eben King wrote:I have a need to find the upgradable package with the most dependencies.Why do you need to do this? And why does speed matter?Generally, I dislike it when lots of things change at the same time, so rather than going through my upgradable packages periodically and updating the lot of them, I run a cron job that, once a day, upgrades a package chosen at random from the list of upgradable packages.
From my point of view, you are seeking for subtle bugs due to partial upgrades. Perhaps apt-listchanges might help you to manage updates (notice that changelog entries are not enabled by default). Security updates have been mentioned in this thread already.
I recall a similar request a half of the year ago. For those who want to try to shoot their feet, I expect, APT Python API should allow to query upgradable packages and to walk through their dependency graph.
dependencies=$(apt-get --simulate upgrade "$package" | grep upgraded, | cut -f 1 -d ' ')
Have you tried to run 'apt-get upgrade "$package"' to verify that it acts accordingly to your expectations?