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update-notifier gone ?!?

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pbrunnen
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update-notifier gone ?!?

#1 Post by pbrunnen »

Hello all,
I'm looking for a bit of guidance on this... I have been using update-notifier with Nagios for quite a number of years now and it has been a great tool to keeping updated when package update are released for my servers.

Recently I upgrade one of my boxes to Jessie and started to get errors from nagios that my apt-check script was failing to report valid values (unknown state). After a bit of poking and searching it seems for some unexplained reason (as far as I can tell -- I can't find any discussion about this in my searches) Jessie has the entire "update-notifier" package removed and replaced with a transition to "gnome-packagekit".

What I fail to understand is why this transition? I don't have any GUI on my servers and I certainly don't want one. But if I install this package I get all the gnome junk. The list of dependencies for this package are horrendous... Update notifier was a simple, elegant tool that would work in the console. I can't make "gnome-packagekit" do what "update-notifier" did... so how is this a replacement for it?

What are we supposed to do for a plain old text-based apt state information?

Any help is appreciated and my apologies as I am completely flummoxed right now...
Thanks! -Cheers, Peter.

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dilberts_left_nut
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Re: update-notifier gone ?!?

#2 Post by dilberts_left_nut »

Why not just use the output of apt-get directly?
AdrianTM wrote:There's no hacker in my grandma...

pbrunnen
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Re: update-notifier gone ?!?

#3 Post by pbrunnen »

Hi dilberts_left_nut,
How do you propose I do that? apt-get is excellent for user interaction, but it isn't very friendly for parsing...

Thanks. -Cheers, Peter.

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stevepusser
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Re: update-notifier gone ?!?

#4 Post by stevepusser »

You might want to look at the source for kmathern's apt-notifier package here, then: http://main.mepis-deb.org/mepiscr/repo/ ... -notifier/

which gets the number of available updates with some scripting commands (apt-notifier.py)
MX Linux packager and developer

pbrunnen
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Re: update-notifier gone ?!?

#5 Post by pbrunnen »

Hello stevepusser,
Thanks for the feedback. Indeed... I am pretty sure that is the source for what was the "update-notifier" package. And that is most likely the path I will take... though I try to keep with packages included by the maintainers to reduce the amount of things going boom during upgrades.

My question was more about the bigger question as I see it -- why on earth the decision was made to not only remove "update-notifier" but make it a meta package for "gnome-packagekit" which has a huge prerequisite package set. Any I really can't find any discussion on the topic either.

Thanks. -Cheers, Peter.


pbrunnen
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Re: update-notifier gone ?!?

#7 Post by pbrunnen »

Hi fireExit,
Thanks for the links.

So if I understand these links correctly:
- PackageKit is a front-end to all different package managers, so I assume a front-end to apt sort of like aptitude is.
- PackageKit is fed a common package metadata via AppStream so that packages are the same across distributions.
- DEP-11 is debian's work to bring AppStream into the debian world.
- "update-notifier" requires "update-manager" which is dangerous because of some issues with package handling.

The exact package that I need is "update-notifier-common" which doesn't have the requirements of "update-notifier"... so I guess I will need to email the package maintainer (if that still works) to ask why this was dropped. Maybe the wheezy version will work on jessie... It seems from searching that others are having similar automation problems with Chef, etc.

Question: Is this AppStream in debian expected to replace apt and aptitude down the line?

Thanks! -Cheers, Peter.

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Re: update-notifier gone ?!?

#8 Post by stevepusser »

As far as I know, apt-notifier was developed independently for MEPIS and then MX, but maybe got some inspirations from update-notifier.
MX Linux packager and developer

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