Something very helpful is on its way to land in Debian’s APT package manager, set to gain a significant usability improvement. Namely, a new merge request proposes the addition of a built-in history command, giving users a straightforward way to review past package operations directly from the terminal.
The idea is inspired by a long-standing feature in Fedora’s DNF package manager, which has offered transaction history inspection for years. With this change, APT introduces two new subcommands:
apt history-list– lists previous package transactions.apt history-info– shows detailed information about a selected transaction.
These commands are designed to parse APT’s log files natively, without requiring external scripts or third-party tools. In practice, this means users will be able to check when a package was installed, upgraded, or removed, along with the corresponding transaction details.
In other words, we’ll no longer need to rely on commands dpkg -l | grep some_package_name to find out if a package is already installed or sift through endless log files to figure out when a change happened.
So, no matter how you look at it, adding a history capability to APT is a great and much-needed addition to this already highly respected package manager. At this stage, the feature is still under review in this merge request.
