It happened multiple times that I have been annoyed by a NEWS.Debian
saying that some perl library installed on my system got some backwards
incompatible change. I have that perl library as a dependency of something
else and I don't care about this change. I assume the package I care about
has been fixed to work with that version since the dependencies allow the
update.

Thus I would like apt-listchanges to not display this message. I'm not
sure what is the best approach but there are multiple ways to deal with
this:

- by showing messages only from packages which are marked as manually
  installed (apt-mark showmanual) but this might be a bit too restrictive
  this should be extended to include (first-level) dependencies of
  manually installed metapackages as well (Section: metapackages)

- by hiding messages of library packages (Section: libs, perl, ruby,
  python, etc) which have been automatically installed (apt-mark
  showauto).

Whatever you decide in the end, I believe this feature should be enabled
by default.

Hi,

(I saw this e-mail by chance and want share my two cents -- I am not an
authoritative voice for apt-listchanges in any way)


As with other issues related with automatic management of a system in
general, I don't think that there's a workable way to satisfy this
request.  Things start to break apart when one starts to look closely
into the implementation details.

For example...

2016-05-13 10:04 Raphaël Hertzog:

I think that this is not practical, because one might have gcc or gcc-6
installed as a convenience package (or same with linux-* "convenience"
packages) and are genuinely interested in the detailed changes of the
compiler, but then apt-listchanges will not show the details of those
packages, only of the higher-level "convenience" packages.

I am very much interested in the changes of openssl or libc, even if I
don't pay attention in general to the news items of libs or the other
sections that you mention.

One only needs to miss an important NEWS item that actually matters for
that particular system/case (e.g. change in an interpreter that subtly
breaks your code) to realise that one has been filtering away one step
too much.  And one only realises of those things too late, when things
break that one cares about.  But this specific thing that one cares
about and breaks is different for every person.


Still, perhaps it's possible to provide filters based on the examples
above, so people can use them if they wish.

But I don't think that it should enabled by default in any way, because
that would break expectations of people that have been using
apt-listchanges for more than a decade.

apt-listchanges already asks about config details through debconf, so
perhaps adding another question related to this would be easy -- if and
once the filters are implemented, of course.


Cheers.

A somewhat related issue is that libraries installed by debian-installer
is marked as manually-installed - see bug#742977

 - Jonas