Pain in the APT

Pester people about available package updates by email or jabber.

Pain in the APT pesters people about available package upgrades, just like apticron or cron-apt. However, it does so by SMTP and XMPP (direct or MUC/conference room), but also by calling mailx.

What does it do?

  1. updates the APT cache and checks for updates
  2. sends list of available updates to Jabber contacts or a conference room immediately
  3. sends list of available updates and relevant changelogs (slow) to email recipients
  4. downloads packages, but does not install them

Messages are only sent when there is any change in either the list of updates or in the configuration of painintheapt.

Options

-c, --configfile configuration file
configuration file, (defaults: /etc/painintheapt.conf)
-d, --debug
print debug output to stderr
-f, --force
send message, even if updates did not change
-h, --help
print help
-s, --stampfile stamp file
stamp file (default: /var/lib/painintheapt/stamp)

Configuration

The default configuration file is /etc/painintheapt.conf in inifile format.

There are up to three sections, SMTP, XMPP, and MAILX. The keys for SMTP are server, port, username, password, from, to, and cc. The keys for XMPP are jid, password, to, and room. The keys for MAILX are from, to, and cc. See the sample configuration for their usage.

The typical cron file is /etc/cron.d/painintheapt. One may call painintheapt without arguments daily, and with the --force option weekly, to make sure the transport does work.

It is highly recommended to set the accompanying logo as Jabber avatar for the respective user.

Resources

License

Affero General Public License 3 or higher

Author

  1. Martin Borgert <debacle@debian.org>