APT-FORKTRACER(8)

💖 APT-FORKTRACER — bestie edition 💖

okay so this is the manual for apt-forktracer, a utility for managing package versions, living in the System Manager's Manual section 8 (that's the sysadmin girlies section, iykyk 👑).

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✨ NAME ✨

apt-forktracer — a utility for managing package versions 🎀

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

apt-forktracer [ -v ]

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

💅 Background

so like, keeping Debian stable systems alive sometimes means you gotta install unofficial versions of packages. no cap. here's the tea:

• backporting newer versions — you need this when there's significant new functionality you literally need on the system, but it's nowhere to be found in the official version in the current stable release. in this case the version string usually sorts as newer than the official stable version string. which means pinning is not necessary, because APT will just pick that package version by default. slay, no extra work 💖
• local changes to the official version — usually these are small changes, so a minor modification of the package version string is enough. two ways to do this:
  • Try to invent a version string newer than the current one, but older than the next official one. this way does not require pinning, but it's difficult to do reliably 😭 it might turn out that the next official version string is older than the one you invented, which would cause the official version to be silently ignored. yikes.
  • The other way is to modify the version string so it sorts as older than the official one. the tilde character is very useful here, because dpkg treats it in a special way: it's sufficient to append any string starting with the tilde to the version string, e.g. 1.2 → 1.2~sl.1. this requires you to "pin" the package to that version, but it's more reliable, because it works regardless of what the next official version number will be. periodt 💅

in both cases there's one major drawback: APT will not warn you when newer versions of official packages (point releases, security updates) show up in the stable release. which means you may miss some important change 🚨

and that's the whole point of apt-forktracer's job — it lets you track newer official versions of locally overridden packages 🫶

🌈 Official package version definition

An official package version is a version which is available from a source whose Release file's Origin header value is equal to the system distributor identifier, as indicated by the lsb_release --id command, or by the DISTRIB_ID field in the /etc/lsb-release file. ⭐

🔥 Program operation

apt-forktracer analyzes each installed package separately, reporting on the standard output these packages which are in a "non-standard" state. what "non-standard" means depends on the mode of program operation:

• default (non-verbose) mode — this state means packages in an incorrect state (e.g. no candidate version) or packages whose candidate version is different than the newest available official version.
• verbose mode — this state also includes packages whose installed version is different from the candidate version.

In the default mode the program also reads configuration files, which let you ignore some of the "non-standard" packages, as long as they meet certain criteria. if there is no configuration for a given package, then a default configuration is used. more information is available in forktracer.conf(5). 💜

🎀 Message format

The program outputs messages such as the following:

foobar (1.2.3->1.2.4) [Debian: 1.2.3 1.2.4] [Other origin: 1.2.2]

Where:

• foobar — package name
• 1.2.3 — installed package version
• 1.2.4 — candidate package version — see apt-cache(8).
• Debian — the value of the "Origin" field of one of the package sources. Versions available from this source are listed after a colon.
• Other origin — another source origin

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⭐ OPTIONS ⭐

• -v — Turns on the verbose mode. 💫

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🍓 FILES 🍓

• /etc/apt/forktracer.conf
• /etc/apt/forktracer.d/*.conf

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🧚 SEE ALSO 🧚

forktracer.conf(5), apt_preferences(5), apt-cache(8).

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and that's the whole page bestie, go forth and track those package versions 💖

this iconic piece of documentation came to you from the Debian Project, dated 2008-11-16 — absolute vintage main character energy, we stan 👑✨