PKGLOG - Linux utility to output concise log of package changes

This is a Linux command line utility to output a concise list of packages installed, removed, upgraded, downgraded, or reinstalled. It should be able to parse package log formats used by the common Linux distributions. Example output is shown below.

1. Most terminals show this output in color, as seen above. Five different colors are used to identify the package actions as shown in the table below. You can choose to disable colored output.

2. Changes are grouped together by time so you can distinguish the group of packages changed each time you did package updates/installs/removal. By default, all changes with less than a succeeding 2 minute gap between any of them are grouped together, but you can change that time value.

3. By default, only package changes over the last 30 days are shown. You can choose to specify the number of days back, or from a specific date (optionally plus a time, or specify just a time and today is assumed), since last boot, or for all time.

4. The LAST SYSTEM BOOT line shows you which packages have been changed since the last boot, e.g. if the linux kernel package has updated you may decide to reboot asap.

5. You can specify one or more package names and only changes to those packages are shown. You can specify glob or regular expression patterns for the names. See the USAGE section below.

6. You can use the -n/--installed-net option to see a list of all packages currently installed and their date of installation. E.g. use this option after you have installed and removed a heap of trial packages and you want to easily see if you have actually removed all of them and their dependencies. E.g. pkglog -n -d0 shows a net summary of packages you ended up installing today. Refer to the Installed Net Output Options section below.

See the latest documentation and code at https://github.com/bulletmark/pkglog.

Colored Output Lines

Package Action	Line Text Color
Installed	green
Removed	red
Upgraded	yellow
Downgraded	magenta
Reinstalled	cyan

You can use a command line option to disable colors explicitly, or set that option disabled as a default option.

Log File Formats

Parsers for the following log formats currently exist. The appropriate parser for you system is normally automatically determined. Alternatively, you can choose the log file path[s], and/or parser explicitly. You can also set these as default options.

A very simple parser plugin architecture is used, so creating a new parser is easy. Use the -f/--parser-file option to explicitly specify the path to your custom parser for development. By default, parsers are loaded from the parsers/ sub-directory so, if cloning, forking, or submitting a PR for the software, then simply place your custom parser file in that directory and the program will automatically recognise it. See the current parsers for example code.

Log Parser	Default Path	Distribution
apt	/var/log/apt/history*	Debian, Ubuntu, etc
dnf	/var/log/dnf.rpm.log	RedHat, Fedora, etc
pacman	/var/log/pacman.log	Arch, Manjaro, etc
zypper	/var/log/zypp/history	OpenSUSE

Usage

Type pkglog -h to view the usage summary:

usage: pkglog [-h] [-u | -i | -I | -n] [-N INSTALLED_NET_DAYS]
                   [-d DAYS | -a | -b] [-j] [-v] [-c]
                   [-p {pacman,zypper,apt,dnf} | -f PARSER_PLUGIN]
                   [-t TIMEGAP] [-P PATH] [-g | -r] [-V]
                   [package ...]

Reports concise log of package changes.

positional arguments:
  package               specific package name[s] to report

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -u, --updated-only    show updated only
  -i, --installed       show installed/removed only
  -I, --installed-only  show installed only
  -n, --installed-net   show net installed only
  -N INSTALLED_NET_DAYS, --installed-net-days INSTALLED_NET_DAYS
                        days previously removed before being re-considered as
                        new net installed, default=2. Set to 0 to disable.
  -d DAYS, --days DAYS  show all packages only from given number of days ago,
                        or from given YYYY-MM-DD[?HH:MM[:SS]],
                        default=30(days), 0=today, -1=all. If only time is
                        specified, then today is assumed.
  -a, --alldays         show all packages for all days (same as "--days=-1")
  -b, --boot            show only packages updated since last boot
  -j, --nojustify       don't right justify version numbers
  -v, --verbose         be verbose, describe upgrades/downgrades
  -c, --no-color        do not color output lines
  -p {pacman,zypper,apt,dnf}, --parser {pacman,zypper,apt,dnf}
                        log parser type, default=pacman
  -f PARSER_PLUGIN, --parser-plugin PARSER_PLUGIN
                        path to alternate custom parser plugin file
  -t TIMEGAP, --timegap TIMEGAP
                        max minutes gap between grouped changes, default=2
  -P PATH, --path PATH  alternate log path[s] (separate multiple using ":",
                        must be time sequenced)
  -g, --glob            given package name[s] is glob pattern to match
  -r, --regex           given package name[s] is regular expression to match
  -V, --version         show pkglog version

Note you can set default starting options in ~/.config/pkglog-flags.conf.

Installed Net Output Options

The purpose of the -n/--installed-net option is perhaps not intuitively clear so this section explains it by way of an example.

There are times when experimenting etc that I install and remove a heap of various packages, e.g. over a few hours or days. At the end of that experiment I remove all the packages I believe I installed for my experiment. However, I am never too sure I have removed everything, e.g. some dependencies that were automatically installed. So I type:

$ pkglog -d4 -n

The above shows the "net" packages have ended up installed over the last 4 days, i.e. those that were newly installed in the last 4 days and not yet removed. I can then manually remove any packages I see listed that I don't want.

There are some favorite packages which I normally have always installed but I may remove very temporarily for some reason. Since these packages then appear "newly" installed then they may be undesirably listed in the -n/--installed-net output. To avoid this the -N/--installed-net-days option, by default set to 2 days, removes packages from the -n/--installed-net output which were previously uninstalled only for that specified number of days or less. You can disable this filter option by setting it to 0, e.g. as a default option.

Default Options

You can add default options to a personal configuration file ~/.config/pkglog-flags.conf. If that file exists then each line of options in the file will be concatenated and automatically prepended to your pkglog command line options.

This allow you to set default preferred starting options to pkglog. Type pkglog -h to see the options supported. E.g. echo "--days 7" >~/.config/pkglog-flags.conf to make pkglog only display the last 7 days of changes by default. This is also useful to set your parser explicitly using -p/--parser (e.g. if the default parser is not automatically determined correctly on your system).

Installation

Arch Linux users can install pkglog from the AUR.

Python 3.7 or later is required. Note pkglog is on PyPI so just ensure that pipx is installed then type the following:

$ pipx install pkglog

To upgrade:

$ pipx upgrade pkglog

Note that python package looseversion is also required if you want to parse zypper logs:

$ pipx inject pkglog looseversion

License

Copyright (C) 2020 Mark Blakeney. This program is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/ for more details.