History of Updates virtually empty

[bpeary]

Following Clem's suggestion to View my history of updates to see if I was impacted by debhelper, I found only 6 items listed for the past YEAR, all applets. What's going on here? I update whenever updates are available.

[bpeary]

Looking further, I see that I don't have a /var/log/dpkg.log file

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 ~> grep "install " /var/log/dpkg.log
grep: /var/log/dpkg.log: No such file or directory]

How can I start up logging?

[mikeflan]

Please post the output of these commands in a terminal:

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ls -la /var/log/dpkg*
inxi -S

If you want to you can try this:

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apt reinstall mintupdate

Then type mintupdate and check the history.

[iliketrains]

Looking further, I see that I don't have a /var/log/dpkg.log file

Me neither. There are some compressed(gz) files in that directory.
You can also look in /var/log/apt/ for logs. They roll over approximately monthly so reading the most recently compressed archive is:
zcat /var/log/apt/history.log.1.gz
or zless if you'd rather space bar than scroll.

Why mintupdate isn't storing history I don't know. Some weirdness has gone on with update recently but that particular complaint hasn't been posted afaik. It's purely GUI and there's no obvious (to me) preference setting or user config file for history. Re-install as mikeflan suggests may be best bet, give it a day to see if another suggestion is offered.

btw: Meaning of "impacted by debhelper" ? Some bug to be aware of ?

edit/ Ignore my question, Clem's blog says debhelper is related to the mintupdate 5.8.3 problem.
The 5.8.3 upgrade (if it was done) should show June 21 in /var/log/apt/history.log.1.gz
or at least that's where I see it.

[bpeary]

Thanks for the advice on this. No rush, I just want to make sure things are working properly.

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ls -la /var/log/dpkg*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2761 Jul  3 10:56 /var/log/dpkg.log

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inxi -S
System:
  Host: MINT Kernel: 5.4.0-121-generic x86_64 bits: 64 
  Desktop: Cinnamon 5.2.7 Distro: Linux Mint 20.3 Una  

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  sudo apt reinstall mintupdate
The following packages will be REINSTALLED:
  mintupdate 
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 reinstalled, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 627 kB of archives. After unpacking 0 B will be used.
Get: 1 http://packages.linuxmint.com una/main amd64 mintupdate all 5.8.4 
Fetched 627 kB in 0s (2,961 kB/s)  
(Reading database ... 264999 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../mintupdate_5.8.4_all.deb ...
Unpacking mintupdate (5.8.4) over (5.8.4) ...
Setting up mintupdate (5.8.4) ...
The unit files have no installation config (WantedBy=, RequiredBy=, Also=,
Alias= settings in the [Install] section, and DefaultInstance= for template
units). This means they are not meant to be enabled using systemctl.
 
Possible reasons for having this kind of units are:
• A unit may be statically enabled by being symlinked from another unit's
  .wants/ or .requires/ directory.
• A unit's purpose may be to act as a helper for some other unit which has
  a requirement dependency on it.
• A unit may be started when needed via activation (socket, path, timer,
  D-Bus, udev, scripted systemctl call, ...).
• In case of template units, the unit is meant to be enabled with some
  instance name specified.
Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils (0.24+linuxmint1) ...
Processing triggers for mime-support (3.64ubuntu1) ...
Processing triggers for hicolor-icon-theme (0.17-2) ...
Processing triggers for gnome-menus (3.36.0-1ubuntu1) ...
Processing triggers for libglib2.0-0:amd64 (2.64.6-1~ubuntu20.04.4) ...
Processing triggers for libglib2.0-0:i386 (2.64.6-1~ubuntu20.04.4) ...
Processing triggers for man-db (2.9.1-1) ...
  

[bpeary]

Here's what I'm seeing in History:

[iliketrains]

Hmmm...
ls /var/log/dpkg*
returns
/var/log/dpkg.log (I suggested it didn't exist, meant to say it was empty)
/var/log/dpkg.log,1
and a bunch of compressed archived logs

Does

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ls /var/log/apt/history*

only return /var/log/apt/history.log ?

[bpeary]

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 11:33am (bp) ~> ls /var/log/dpkg*
ls: No match.
 11:34am (bp) ~> ls /var/log/apt/history*
ls: No match.
  

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  11:37am (bp) ~> ls /var/log
auth.log  gpu-manager.log  mintsystem.log	  syslog.1					   wtmp
btmp	  kern.log	   mintsystem.timestamps  ubuntu-system-adjustments-adjust-grub-title.log  Xorg.0.log
cups/	  lastlog	   private/		  ubuntu-system-adjustments-start.log
dmesg	  lightdm/	   syslog		  ufw.log
 

[mikeflan]

ls -la /var/log/dpkg*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2761 Jul 3 10:56 /var/log/dpkg.log

It is odd that you don't have a bunch of gz files in there. Like this:

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$ ls -la /var/log/dpkg*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root     0 Jul  1 04:13 /var/log/dpkg.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 35317 Jun 22 19:59 /var/log/dpkg.log.1
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   370 Sep  4  2021 /var/log/dpkg.log.10.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 14375 Aug 27  2021 /var/log/dpkg.log.11.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  5238 Jul  8  2021 /var/log/dpkg.log.12.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   501 May 11 19:32 /var/log/dpkg.log.2.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  5191 Apr 28 04:12 /var/log/dpkg.log.3.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  7395 Mar 24 10:12 /var/log/dpkg.log.4.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  6404 Feb 24 18:03 /var/log/dpkg.log.5.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  4521 Jan 27 20:23 /var/log/dpkg.log.6.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  7855 Dec 30  2021 /var/log/dpkg.log.7.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  5201 Nov 20  2021 /var/log/dpkg.log.8.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 13165 Oct 25  2021 /var/log/dpkg.log.9.gz
$

Please supply the output of this in a terminal:

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tar -czf test.tar.gz ~/Downloads/*

Did it create the test.tar.gz file? If so, you might want to delete it.
This is the output I get:

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$ tar -czf test.tar.gz ~/Downloads/*
tar: Removing leading `/' from member names
$ 

and it does create the test.tar.gz file.

[iliketrains]

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ls /var/log/dpkg*
ls: No match.

but earlier

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ls -la /var/log/dpkg*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2761 Jul  3 10:56 /var/log/dpkg.log

That's strange. Also the usual return if 'ls' can't find a file is "no such file or directory".
Any chance the HD is full ?

A Hail Mary pass:

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locate dpkg.log

[bpeary]

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  12:36pm (bp) ~> tar -czf test.tar.gz ~/Downloads/*
tar: No match.
 

Free space = 26 Gb

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  12:39pm (bp) ~> locate dpkg.log
 12:42pm (bp) ~> 
  

[iliketrains]

How can I start up logging?

No one ?

Bash seems to be having a problem with wildcards (*) but not always. The 'not always' part is hard to understand.
If Downloads directory exists and is not empty that tar command should have worked.

[bpeary]

Upgrade to Mint 21 fixed this.