Comment 18 for bug 1992026

The output of apt (and apt-get) now need to reflect differential availability of updates, so a certain level of disruption is unavoidable. We did have that in -proposed for a while to shake out any issues.

It was slightly cheeky to use that change to also give people a heads-up of new capabilities, but I think it better to have a format change land everywhere rather than scatter-shot based on specific package update patterns (i.e. it would be worse to have a different layout appear on a specific machine only when there is a differentially available update for the first time). On reflection, based on feedback, we'd like to generalise that to provide contextual information about updates to CLI users, much as we have in the GUI. That's the 'apt news' mechanism, which will give us an out-of-band ability to raise awareness of update-related matters without a full apt package update.

For example, if we have another heartbleed, we will use this mechanism to make CLI users aware of it.

The proposal does include a way to suppress news, which will survive upgrades, and also the ability for apt plugins to learn about a 'quiet' mode, which will be valuable for many plugins other than the news one.

I do think it would be reasonable to expect the news to be related to updates and changes in the archive that are interesting for someone using apt, rather than general news, so can happily agree to set that policy and expectation amongst the folk who have write access to the news.