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I briefly enabled updates from jaunty-proposed to see if there was an updated for a particular package that was causing me issues. There was a couple of updates for other packages which I installed and now I'm having issues with my ethernet. But I can't remember which proposed packages I installed.

How can I find out which packages have been installed from jaunty-proposed rather than jaunty-updates?

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3 Answers 3

up vote 1 down vote accepted

Aptitude has an incredibly rich set of search patterns. In your case, you'll want ~i (for "installed") and ~A<archive>, like so:

aptitude search '~i ~Ajaunty-proposed'

As an example, I have a few packages installed from 'hardy-backports':

$ aptitude search '~i ~Ahardy-backports'
i A bacula-common                   - network backup, recovery and verification
i   bacula-fd                       - network backup, recovery and verification
i A libsvn-perl                     - Perl bindings for Subversion
i A libsvn1                         - Shared libraries used by Subversion
i   rsync                           - fast remote file copy program (like rcp)
i   subversion                      - Advanced version control system
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Exactly what I was after, thanks. –  humble coffee Aug 9 '09 at 5:08

There's various things you can try with apt-cache policy that could help -- going through all the packages on your system and looking at the policy to work out where the "currently installed" version is from (scripted, of course, because doing that by hand would be insane) would give you a pretty exhaustive list. Alternately, if you wanted a smaller set of packages to look at by hand, /var/log/dpkg.log lists all package management activities, so you can just go back to when you started fiddling around and look at the packages that were installed since then -- not so much help if you've done a dist-upgrade, but quite handy if you've got a small set of changes to review.

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There should be a record in /var/log/apt or /var/log/dpkg (you may need to double check the names; I think the apt one is a directory and the dpkg one is close to the name of the logfile) that lists what packages and actions were taken and from that you should be able to figure out what happened.

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