[Aptitude-devel] Is there a way to know what the package has been obsoleted by?

[Daniel Burrows]

On Sun, Jun 15, 2008 at 07:21:34AM +0530, shirish <shirishag75 at gmail.com> was heard to say:
> From Daniel came to know that I can find obsolete packages using
> aptitude such as
> 
> shirish at Mugglewille:~$ aptitude search "~o" |more

  [snip]

> Now my query is, is there a way to know by what has a package been
> obsoleted. From what little I have understood of obsolete packages in
> Ubuntu/debian obsolete packages mean either those packages which have
> nobody to maintain or something or whose functionality has been
> superseded by some other package. (I know about locally created
> packages which mean they are not from ubuntu archive)

  This information is not stored in any way that aptitude can get at it,
so no, you can't find this out.  In fact, I don't believe there's any
tool that can do this, because the information isn't published in a
machine-readable form anywhere (please correct me if I'm wrong).

  You could maybe search for packages that replace or conflict with your
obsolete package, but that's a scattershoot approach, at best.

  Daniel