Debian Administration

I can't think of a global solution to this, certainly not something that keeps track of package re-configuration.

But there are a couple of different ways of keeping track of package addition/removal/upgrading which you might be able to investigate as a starting point.

These are just the things that spring to mind - others might have better solutions:

apt-listchanges

The apt-listchanges package, which we covered here can be setup to send email whenever a package has been upgraded.

This sends the package changelog to a mail address, which should allow you to keep track of package upgrades. But it doesn't handle package removals at all.

dpkg-changes

dpkg-changes which I wrote will keep track of noticing package additions or removals in a simplistic fashion.

It keeps a copy of the dpkg package installation logs, and when run it will show you what's changed since the previous invocation. I have a cronjob setup to run this nightly - so every morning I can see what other sysadmins at my company might have added/removed without telling me.

Sample output:

steve@skx:~/Mail$ dpkg-changes --uncache
Package Change Report for skx.my.flat

2 packages removed:
        aide
        apache

1 package added:
        aptitude

tripwire

Tripwire/integrit/other software integrity checkers will allow you to keep track of binaries upon your system which might have changed, showing something has occurred.

This should also allow you to keep track of package upgrades/changes. It might allow you to keep track of configuration file changes if you monitor /etc/ too...

Steve
-- Steve.org.uk

This script doesn't answer exactly to the question asked but proved to be useful. It extracts the version and installed time of all the installed packages.

#!/usr/bin/python
# get version and install time of installed packages
# Jean-Marc Chaton
import apt_pkg
import os
import time

apt_pkg.init()
cache = apt_pkg.GetCache()
packages = cache.Packages
for package in packages:
 if package.CurrentState==6:
  installtime=os.path.getmtime("/var/lib/dpkg/info/"+ package.Name + ".list")
  installtimestr=time.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M",time.localtime(installtime))
  print "%s %35s %s" % (installtimestr, package.Name, package.CurrentVer.VerStr)