Determine packages made obsolete in Bookworm

kjoh...@eclypse.org

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Jul 20, 2023, 4:20:05 PM7/20/23

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I would like to discover which currently installed packages in Bullseye (11) will be obsolete (no longer available from a Debian repository) in Bookworm (12) _before starting the upgrade process_.

It might be that there is a list of the more than 6,296 packages removed as obsolete (source: Debian press release), and I could compare to that list for matches. Or, perhaps there is a list of the 64,419 packages in Bookworm and I could find which ones are missing.

How can I get thoses lists? Or is there another way to discover what I want to know?

Thanks,

Ken

Dan Ritter

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Jul 20, 2023, 4:40:06 PM7/20/23

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Those lists are the Packages files in each repo. You'll want to
do some judicious grepping to extract the specific fields that
you want.

For a single machine, you could:

* change apt sources.list
* apt update
* apt-get dist-upgrade -s

capture the output of that simulation: it will tell you what it
would remove.

Then revert sources.list and re-update to get back to where you
were.

-dsr-

Charles Curley

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Jul 20, 2023, 5:00:06 PM7/20/23

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On Thu, 20 Jul 2023 14:31:43 -0500
<kjoh...@eclypse.org> wrote:

> I would like to discover which currently installed packages in
> Bullseye (11) will be obsolete (no longer available from a Debian
> repository) in Bookworm (12) _before starting the upgrade process_.

You can get some of that from the release notes.

--
Does anybody read signatures any more?

https://charlescurley.com
https://charlescurley.com/blog/

Sven Joachim

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Jul 20, 2023, 5:00:06 PM7/20/23

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There is a way to find the obsolete packages installed on _your_ system,
which is probably what you really care about. After preparing your
sources.list to add the bookworm repositories and remove the bullseye
ones[1], run "apt update". Then "apt list '~o'" lists all the packages
which are no longer available. See apt-patterns(7).

Good luck,
Sven

1. https://www.debian.org/releases/bookworm/amd64/release-notes/ch-upgrading.en.html

David Wright

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Jul 20, 2023, 5:10:05 PM7/20/23

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What I did was to run:

$ dpkg-query -W -f '${Package}\n' | LC_ALL=C sort

to get a list of current packages. Then I downloaded:

https://packages.debian.org/stable/allpackages?format=txt.gz

and ran it through:

$ zcat allpackages\?format\=txt.gz | tail -n +7 | cut -d\ -f 1

for a list of bookworm packages. (Sort it as well if you're a worrier.)

Then I compared the new and old files with diff -U9999 piped
into less, and searched with /^\+ Most of the 107 "missing" packages
were libs, which don't really interest me, then versioned kernels, gcc
and python.

Cheers,
David.

kjoh...@eclypse.org

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Jul 20, 2023, 6:20:07 PM7/20/23

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> I would like to discover which currently installed packages in Bullseye (11) will be obsolete (no longer available from a Debian repository) in Bookworm (12) _before starting the upgrade process_.

> It might be that there is a list of the more than 6,296 packages removed as obsolete (source: Debian press release), and I could compare to that list for matches. Or, perhaps there is a list of the 64,419 packages in Bookworm and I could find which ones are missing.

> How can I get thoses lists? Or is there another way to discover what I want to know?

Thank you for the helpful replies. I happen to prefer Mr. Wright's approach (fetch https://packages.debian.org/stable/allpackages?format=txt.gz, compare to list of locally installed packages), though I used 'comm' rather than diff. This gave me 169 items; 55 did not begin with lib.

Ken