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I know it is possible to manually inspect /var/log/dpkg.log or /var/log/apt/hist

ID: 661096 • Letter: I

Question

I know it is possible to manually inspect /var/log/dpkg.log or /var/log/apt/history.log, but that is not what I call "easy to use".

So is there a tool that will parse those log files, and show me the packages that have been installed, sorted by date, so I can mark the ones I wish to uninstall, press a button, and they get uninstalled?

I need something that's not Ubuntu-specific, because I'm on Debian 7.4, and it needs to catch all packages - even packages installed through dpkg -i.

So far, I know of these programs that have somethings similar, but not quite what I need:

Synaptic has File?History, but it shows only packages installed through Synaptic.
Ubuntu Software Center had something like that, but it is Ubuntu-only. Not sure if it catches things installed outside of Ubuntu Software Center

Explanation / Answer

I don't know of any such tool in Debian, neither in Debian 7 nor in the upcoming Debian 8.

The only tool which goes into that direction is which-pkg-broke from the debian-goodies package. You pass one package as parameter and it recursively lists all dependencies, sorted by the last installation/upgrade date. Not sure if that helps you at least a bit.