> If the use of "--allow-change-held-packages" seams dangerous to you (it > might not as we also set "-s" in the command line, it should be safer to > juste replace "-y" by "--trivial-only" which will answer yes for all non > dangerous questions and no on the orthers.
Since -s is used it is not a matter of "safe" vs. "dangerous", nothing will be actually installed anyway. Otoh, with --trivial-only an available update that however requires "yes" being answered on a "dangerous" question might get lost in the process. > What about replacing the whole complicated line by something more simple > based on apt like this: > > apt list --upgradable 2>/dev/null | sed -ne 's#^\(.*\)/.*$#\1#p' Sounds reasonable, however I believe there are two problems with this: 1. if the maintainers wish to keep apticron's behavior intact, it is not possible this way, since NOTIFY_NEW="1" would no longer have any effect (although most likely the majority of users could live with that). 2. more seriously: the following part from man apt > The apt(8) commandline is designed as a end-user tool and it may change > the output between versions. While it tries to not break backward > compatibility there is no guarantee for it either. All features of apt > (8) are available in apt-cache(8) and apt-get(8) via APT options. > Please prefer using these commands in your scripts. does not sound like the apt command is the preferred tool for a script like apticron. Maybe if apticron's developers contacted the apt development team, they could reassure them that this part of the cli is no subject for changes, though.
