Monday, February 18, 2019

scripts - How do I get a list of non-LTS packages installed efficiently?




I'd like to see to what extent my system is LTS-supported by means of what packages are supported for 5 years and which are not. I could disregard some non-5yr-supported packages, as some are rarely used or very unlikely to get into (security) issues.



I think this is useful as one can get a report and draw a conclusion, e.g. "my system is 100% LTS", "due to packages X,Y,Z, my system is just 99% LTS", "due to the use of KDE, my system is now 50% LTS".



As related to my answer in the question Does 12.04 LXDE have LTS?, I posted a way to see which packages of Ubuntu feature five years of support. E.g.:



$ apt-cache show unity | grep ^Supported
Supported: 5y


$ apt-cache show lxde-core | grep ^Supported



I could write a script to get all information for all the packages, however, the apt-cache commands are horribly slow:



real    0m1.535s
user 0m1.484s
sys 0m0.036s



With 2700+ packages installed, this would take roughly 70 minutes (!).



How can I speed up things and get a report for all non-5yr-supported packages on my system?



I'd prefer a simple apt-* shell command for the use in a simple shell script. If it would require more advanced scripting like going into Python, this is fine too. Eventually, I would like to release a (small) script to create a report on a system easily and quickly.



Note: I'm not interested in the discussion about whether or not a specific flavour of Ubuntu provides LTS or not - this is really just packages. You can just mix LTS and non-LTS packages on a system.



I don't know about your system, but this is what I did:




time dpkg -l | grep 'ii' |  awk ' {print $2}' | xargs apt-cache show | grep '^Supported:' | grep -v '5y' | wc -l
158

real 0m27.549s
user 0m5.580s
sys 0m21.701s


doesn't seem so bad right?




The total number of packages:



dpkg -l | grep 'ii' | wc -l
2602


I am running a AMD E-350 which isn't exactly a blazing fast cpu...



Edit: maximum number of arguments to xargs:




xargs --show-limits

...
POSIX upper limit on argument length (this system): 2091826
...

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