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apt-get update command updates the package list of the repository in our system

apt-get upgrade upgrades the programs if the package version of the new program does not match the current installed version.

apt-cache show shows the detailed information of the package but does not show the date it was released.

But none of these mentions the exact date when the package was updated.

Although we can note the version of the package and visit it's website to see when it was released but is there any way of finding out when the specific/current package version was released on the repository (terminal options would be more helpful)?

GypsyCosmonaut
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2 Answers2

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You can search for the package on tracker.debian.org, under news you can see when things happened.

Henrik supports the community
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According to This, to see when a package was updated you can check the changelog of the package with this command, (unfortunately changelog doesn't work with all package):

apt-get changelog *your_package_name*

And according to This, to see the new package version you can do this : (Don't forget to do "apt-get update" before if you want the last updated package.)

apt list --upgradable

or this :

apt-get --just-print upgrade

To get something more easy to read you can instead use this perl one line parser :

apt-get --just-print upgrade 2>&1 | perl -ne 'if (/Inst\s([\w,\-,\d,\.,~,:,\+]+)\s\[([\w,\-,\d,\.,~,:,\+]+)\]\s\(([\w,\-,\d,\.,~,:,\+]+)\)? /i) {print "PACKAGE: $1 INSTALLED: $2 AVAILABLE: $3\n"}'
jeremy.Snidaro
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    apt-get changelog is probably the best/simplest CLI solution, with a couple of caveats: by default it shows the installed changelog rather than the changelog for the version available in the repository, and the dates in the changelog aren’t necessarily the same as the real upload timestamps (in some cases they’re off by months or even years). – Stephen Kitt May 20 '17 at 12:02