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SysAdmin Blog

find obsolete packages on a Debian system

Alexander Bochmann Saturday 08 of July, 2017
After dist-upgrading a Debian system recently, I wondered which packages might have been left over from previous releases (the system in question has been through several dist-upgrades over its lifetime), even after running apt-get autoremove and deborphan. After dropping that question on Mastodon (cache), I got an answer pointing to apt-show-versions, which I didn't know of up to now.

This totally does what I've been looking for. From the man page:

NAME
       apt-show-versions - Lists available package versions with distribution

DESCRIPTION
       apt-show-versions parses the dpkg status file and the APT lists for the installed and available package
       versions and distribution and shows upgrade options within the specific distribution of the selected package.

       This is really useful if you have a mixed stable/testing environment and want to list all packages which are
       from testing and can be upgraded in testing.


Since I didn't have a package cache for apt-show-versions from the older release, all old packages are currently just shown with a No available version in archive comment. But since current packages are being tagged with the release, I can just exclude those with a simble grep:

# apt-show-versions | egrep -vc jessie
58