MX 21 Repository: The Nala Thread

[Stevo]

We now have a backport of Nala 0.8.2 in the test repository, along with quite a few other "python3-XXX" module package backports that it required, from upstream Debian.

Nala is a frontend for the APT package manager. It has a lot
of the same functionality, but formats the output to be more
human readable. Also implements a history function to see past
transactions and undo/redo them--much like Fedora's dnf history.

See here, but you can now install it from the MX 21 test repo, so ignore the info about getting it from the developers! https://linuxiac.com/nala-apt-command-frontend/

[asqwerth]

We now have a backport of Nala 0.8.2 in the test repository, along with quite a few other "python3-XXX" module package backports that it required, from upstream Debian.

Nala is a frontend for the APT package manager. It has a lot
of the same functionality, but formats the output to be more
human readable. Also implements a history function to see past
transactions and undo/redo them--much like Fedora's dnf history.

See here, but you can now install it from the MX 21 test repo, so ignore the info about getting it from the developers! https://linuxiac.com/nala-apt-command-frontend/

I am denied access to that link, Stevo.

But I'll definitely test this out, as I like the pacman-esque text output and layout.

Thanks!

[Adrian]

Nice tool. I see it mentions something about redo/undo, is there an option or it's a manual process (it displays the history so you know what to undo)?

[asqwerth]

Just tested on a VM. Works well. I like that you just type

sudo nala upgrade

to both refresh package lists as well as initiate updates. I always found the split between apt update and apt full-upgrade very inconvenient.

Display is very colourful.

Good tool.

[jeffreyC]

When I looked on the Nala release page I saw the nala-legacy package, it does not appear to require any backported dependencies in MX-21.1.

[Stevo]

Those are the packages with the newer libraries compiled into one big mysterious (11 MB and over for each architecture) binary blob. Compare to the total arch-independent upload I did of Nala, the backports, and all their source files, which was less than 3 MB. Plus anyone can read the python3 scripts that are installed.

Since Nala is for the most part a dropin replacement for apt, I wonder how much modification our apt-notifier scripts would need to use it...

[fehlix]

Those are the packages with the newer libraries compiled into one big mysterious (11 MB and over for each architecture) binary blob. Compare to the total arch-independent upload I did of Nala, the backports, and all their source files, which was less than 3 MB.

Since Nala is for the most part a dropin replacement for apt, I wonder how much modification our apt-notifier scripts would need to use it...

I do see quite a lot of excellent python code. And some option not have thought about it, like having multiple repos inplace allowing parallel download or find quickest mirror. (We would need to have a "official" mx-mirror.list to use the feature of nala.) I may check a bit further as seem having broken nala, where apt would not fail ... but something I need to formulate a bug-report, nothing we would probably normally not see as it's about either about deb822 of sources file format or mirror-file deb-type (I made quite a lot of tests), which apt and synaptic supports but nala fails or better seem to hang and wont finish.
++EDIT+++
Looks something like this, where nala hangs:

Code: Select all

fehlix@mx211test:~/Desktop
$ sudo LANG=en_US.UTF-8  nala upgrade -y
╭─ Updating Package List ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│Updated:   file:/etc/apt/mx-mirror.list Mirrorlist [152 B]                             │
│No Change: http://mirror.wtnet.de/debian bullseye InRelease                            │
│No Change: http://mirror.de.leaseweb.net/debian bullseye InRelease                     │
│No Change: http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye-updates InRelease                     │
│No Change: http://security.debian.org/debian-security bullseye-security InRelease      │
│No Change: http://mirrors.xtom.nl/debian bullseye InRelease                            │
│No Change: http://nl.mirrors.clouvider.net/debian bullseye InRelease                   │
│No Change: http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye InRelease                             │
│No Change: http://nl.mxrepo.com/mx/repo bullseye InRelease                             │
│Ignored:   https://repo.vivaldi.com/stable/deb stable InRelease                        │
│No Change: https://repo.vivaldi.com/stable/deb stable Release                          │
│No Change: https://deb.librewolf.net bullseye InRelease                                │
│Fetched 0 B in 0s (0 B/s)                                                              │
╰───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯
=========================================================================================
 Upgrading                                                                               
=========================================================================================
  Package:                     Old Version:        New Version:                   Size:  
  dpkg                         1.20.9              1.20.10                       2.5 MB  
  dpkg-dev                     1.20.9              1.20.10                       2.3 MB  
  libdpkg-perl                 1.20.9              1.20.10                       1.5 MB  
  libxml2                      2.9.10+dfsg-6.7+de  2.9.10+dfsg-6.7+d             692 kB  
                               b11u1               eb11u2                                
  linux-libc-dev               5.17.3-1~mx21+1     5.17.6-1~mx21+1               1.6 MB  
  lo-main-helper               22.04.04mx21        22.05.02mx21                   10 kB  
  mx-packageinstaller-pkglist  22.04.04mx21        22.05.02mx21                  176 kB  
                                                                                         
=========================================================================================
 Summary                                                                                 
=========================================================================================
 Upgrade 7 Packages                                                                      
                                                                                         
 Total download size  8.8 MB   
 Disk space required  345 kB   
                               
╭─ Downloading… ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
╭─ Downloading… ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
╭─ Downloading… ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
╭─ Downloading… ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
╭─ Downloading… ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│ Total Packages: 0/7                                                                   │
│ Starting Downloads…                                                                   │
│ Time Remaining: -:--:-- ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 0.0% • 0.0/8.8 MB • ? │
╰───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯

where apt full-upgrade would do:

Code: Select all

sudo LANG=en_US.UTF-8  apt  full-upgrade 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages will be upgraded:
  dpkg dpkg-dev libdpkg-perl libxml2 linux-libc-dev lo-main-helper
  mx-packageinstaller-pkglist
7 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 8,810 kB of archives.
After this operation, 345 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] 
Get:1 file:/etc/apt/mx-mirror.list Mirrorlist [152 B]
Get:5 http://security.debian.org/debian-security bullseye-security/main amd64 dpkg amd64 1.20.10 [2,529 kB]
Get:2 http://nl.mxrepo.com/mx/repo bullseye/ahs amd64 linux-libc-dev amd64 5.17.6-1~mx21+1 [1,552 kB]
Get:6 http://security.debian.org/debian-security bullseye-security/main amd64 dpkg-dev all 1.20.10 [2,306 kB]
Get:7 http://security.debian.org/debian-security bullseye-security/main amd64 libdpkg-perl all 1.20.10 [1,545 kB]
Get:8 http://security.debian.org/debian-security bullseye-security/main amd64 libxml2 amd64 2.9.10+dfsg-6.7+deb11u2 [692 kB]
Get:3 http://nl.mxrepo.com/mx/repo bullseye/main amd64 lo-main-helper all 22.05.02mx21 [9,888 B]
Get:4 http://nl.mxrepo.com/mx/repo bullseye/main amd64 mx-packageinstaller-pkglist all 22.05.02mx21 [176 kB]
Fetched 8,810 kB in 2s (5,243 kB/s)                  
(Reading database ... 299109 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../dpkg_1.20.10_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking dpkg (1.20.10) over (1.20.9) ...
Setting up dpkg (1.20.10) ...
(Reading database ... 299118 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../0-dpkg-dev_1.20.10_all.deb ...
Unpacking dpkg-dev (1.20.10) over (1.20.9) ...
Preparing to unpack .../1-libdpkg-perl_1.20.10_all.deb ...
Unpacking libdpkg-perl (1.20.10) over (1.20.9) ...
Preparing to unpack .../2-libxml2_2.9.10+dfsg-6.7+deb11u2_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking libxml2:amd64 (2.9.10+dfsg-6.7+deb11u2) over (2.9.10+dfsg-6.7+deb11u1) ...
Preparing to unpack .../3-linux-libc-dev_5.17.6-1~mx21+1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking linux-libc-dev:amd64 (5.17.6-1~mx21+1) over (5.17.3-1~mx21+1) ...
Preparing to unpack .../4-lo-main-helper_22.05.02mx21_all.deb ...
Unpacking lo-main-helper (22.05.02mx21) over (22.04.04mx21) ...
Preparing to unpack .../5-mx-packageinstaller-pkglist_22.05.02mx21_all.deb ...
Unpacking mx-packageinstaller-pkglist (22.05.02mx21) over (22.04.04mx21) ...
Setting up linux-libc-dev:amd64 (5.17.6-1~mx21+1) ...
Setting up mx-packageinstaller-pkglist (22.05.02mx21) ...
Setting up libdpkg-perl (1.20.10) ...
Setting up lo-main-helper (22.05.02mx21) ...
Setting up libxml2:amd64 (2.9.10+dfsg-6.7+deb11u2) ...
Setting up dpkg-dev (1.20.10) ...
Processing triggers for man-db (2.9.4-2) ...
Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.31-13+deb11u3) ...

So not sure, ready for the folks ... OTOH, no-one will probably use such edge-case-type of source.list as I have prepared for this tests. So will make some testes to sees how it would look like with apt-notifier.

[Stevo]

Maybe some of those bugs have been addressed in the latest updates, which I will try and backport right now. :

Code: Select all

nala (0.9.1) unstable; urgency=medium

  [ Bug Fixes ]
  * `upgrade` fails sometimes when using install hooks
  * `autoremove` and `autopurge` commands not working
  * Unable to `upgrade` if there is an issue with any repository

 -- Blake Lee <blake@volian.org>  Thu, 09 Jun 2022 10:47:49 -0400

nala (0.9.0) unstable; urgency=medium

  [ Changes ]
  * Add a version `diff` in the new version column to increase readability
  * Change config file to `toml`. This is a breaking change, the older config
    file will not work
  * Add configuration option to disable auto updating the package cache when
    running the `upgrade` command (Closes: #1010913)
  * Add configuration option for pre and post install hooks

  [ Bug Fixes ]
  * Nala stating that it was unable to determine why packages were
    held even if it was able too
  * `fetch` ask prompt not defaulting to yes
  * Exception when using tab completion if the `pkgcache.bin` file
    has not been generated.

 -- Blake Lee <blake@volian.org>  Mon, 23 May 2022 15:53:49 -0400

[Stevo]

Well, 0.9.1 is not throwing python errors yet, so I'll have it go to the MX 21 test repo, or get it early here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1krhLRm ... sp=sharing

[siamhie]

I'm loving nala so far. I did run into the autoremove issue but just ran apt autoremove to fix it in the meantime. I'll wait for 0.9.1 to hit the test repo.

Code: Select all

siamhie@mxflux:~
$ sudo nala update
[sudo] password for siamhie: 
╭─ Updating Package List ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│No Change: http://la.mxrepo.com/mx/repo bullseye InRelease                                        │
│Updated:   http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye-updates InRelease [39.4 kB]                      │
│Updated:   http://security.debian.org/debian-security bullseye-security InRelease [44.1 kB]       │
│No Change: http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye InRelease                                        │
│No Change: https://deb.librewolf.net bullseye InRelease                                           │
│Fetched 83.5 kB in 0s (0 B/s)                                                                     │
╰──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯
All packages are up to date.
siamhie@mxflux:~
$ nala --version
nala 0.8.2
siamhie@mxflux:~
$