WARNING:

BECAUSE OF TIME CONSTRAINTS, I WON'T BUILD apt-current FOR INTERMEDIATE UBUNTU RELEASES AGAIN.

Only Debian and Ubuntu LTS will be supported from now on.

apt-current: don't need an 'apt-get update' ever again!

Forget about apt-get update: just run your apt-get-current install or apt-current full-upgrade commands, and let apt-current perform the update if your lists are outdated, or your sources or configuration has changed since the latest update was executed!

reasoning

While I like apt-based distros, there's something I really love about yum/dnf; when I issue a command like

yum -y install foobar

yum already knows whether it needs to reach out the internet to update its sources. It does so if its configured repos have changed, or if the so called 'metadata' has expired.

apt doesn't have this feature. An apt-get update is required before properly installing the latest version of a package, or before upgrading the system.

Periodic updaters do exist, and this is not a great issue for servers, workstations, or often-on laptops: but it can be tedious to manage for not-so-often used virtual machines, and, mostly, for container systems like Docker. I've seen many Dockerfiles resorting to lists deletion/forced updates every know an then, since an image can be very long-lived and the installations inside it are often automated.

what does apt-current do, precisely?

It adds two new commands, apt-get-current, which is a wrapper for apt-get. and apt-current, which wraps apt

apt-get-current can be used just like plain apt-get, but it is got a small superpower. When performing install, upgrade, or dist-upgrade (or full-upgrade for apt) commands, it will automatically perform an apt-get -y update (or apt -y update) before launching those commands, if any of the following conditions occurs:

• too much time has passed since last apt-get update invocation. By default such time is three hours, but can be configured in /etc/apt-current.conf
• the content of /etc/apt/sources.list or of any relevant file in /etc/apt/sources.list.d has changed since last apt-get update invocation.
• the configuration of apt-get, as shown by apt-config dump, has changed since last apt-get update invocation.
• you're trying to install something and there are no downloaded apt lists at all

So, unless you need a package which has just been released, you'll never need to apt-get update again. Just

apt-get-current -y dist-upgrade

or

apt-get-current -y install foobar

and let it do the dirty part of the job.

Since it's a separate executable, if it's buggy you can always resort to the standard apt-get. No disruption of your user experience.

Also, by default, it will perform an apt-get clean or apt clean after modification commands, although such behaviour can be configured - see next section.

goodies

There're two additional, optional functions as well: apt-current can delete downloaded deb cache and apt lists after such modifications commands are run.

Configuration can be found in /etc/apt-current.conf - see the default at apt-current.conf

also, a new clean-listscommand is enabled; it manually removes currently cached APT lists.

Installation

If you just want a quick glance, or you want to download the .deb to include somewhere, head straight to the Releases page.

There're repositories for various Ubuntu and Debian versions. 64-bit only, currently. Open a ticket if you're still using a 32-bit system and would like a packaged version.

First, you should make sure that you've got Bintray's package signing key properly installed and configured for apt, and that apt supports https:

sudo apt-get -y install apt-transport-https curl

curl https://www.franzoni.eu/keys/D401AB61.txt | sudo apt-key add -

Then, pick the repo for your distribution - see below - and save it as /etc/apt/sources.list.d/apt-current-v1.list

Once the repo file is in place:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install apt-current

Ubuntu Trusty, Xenial, Bionic

Replace bionic with your choice of ubuntu down there.

deb https://dl.bintray.com/alanfranz/apt-current-v1-ubuntu-bionic bionic main

Debian Jessie, Stretch

Replace stretch with your choice of debian down there.

deb https://dl.bintray.com/alanfranz/apt-current-v1-debian-stretch stretch main

TODO

• gracefully handle apt-get update errors

Contacts

Feel free to open an issue for anything you'd like to discuss.

FAQ

• please note that at the first run a priming apt-get update will be launched, even though you'd just have launched one.