apt-listchanges
===============

Default APT behavior only displays NEWS entries
-----------------------------------------------

Please note that even though apt-listchanges can automatically display
entries from both NEWS.Debian, and the changelog[.Debian] files during
upgrades with APT, the default installation enables displaying of the
NEWS.Debian entries only. To enable displaying the changelog entries
as well, please run:
  dpkg-reconfigure apt-listchanges


How apt-listchanges decides what to display
-------------------------------------------

See /usr/share/doc/apt-listchanges/what_to_display.html.


Snapshots in experimental releases
----------------------------------

When apt-listchanges is being released into the experimental
repository, the developers may enable snapshots. When snapshots are
enabled and apt-listchanges is called by apt, it copies of some files
and data which influence how the program behaves in a subdirectory of
/var/lib/apt, and before exiting it packs them into a .tar.xz file and
saves the seven most recent ones. If you are using an experimental
release of apt-listchanges and you encounter a bug, the developers may
ask you to provide one of these snapshots to them to assist in
debugging.

The settings which control this behavior are "capture_snapshots" and
"snapshot_dir" in /etc/apt/listchanges.conf. If you never want
apt-listchanges to capture snapshots even when you are using an
experimental release, you can set "capture_snapshots=no" in that file
to prevent it. Otherwise, the configuration scripts for
apt-listchanges automatically install the correct settings as needed.
In particular, "capture_snapshots" is set to "auto" if it's not set
when an experimental release is installed, which tells apt-listchanges
that later when a non-experiemental release is installed it should
remove the setting automatically and thereby disable snapshots.


Sharing the status database between machines
--------------------------------------------

The status database, /var/lib/apt/listchanges, can be shared between
machines, see https://bugs.debian.org/658444 for a use case, using
NFS-mounted storage, as long as you do not run more than one instance
of apt-listchanges at time (otherwise the database might get corrupted
due to lack of locking). The '--dump-seen' option can be used to
examine the contents of the database.