Can't get this to work. I've added a spurious line to the etc/apt/sources.list file, which induces several "error" messages when I input (as root) aptitude --log-level=info However, none of said error messages show up in /var/log/aptitude

Wrong file. Scroll to the bottom of the man-page, check the FILES section. What made you think that sources.list was the right place for that, @Digger ?

Thanks for your attention to this matter! I modified said sources.list file merely to corrupt same so that some errors would be generated when I called up Aptitude (this, hopefully, being an easy way to "force" Aptitude to generate error messages). I then expected, as a result of my test, to find said error messages logged in /var/log/aptitude, but could find nothing...

@Digger If you expected to find warnings in /var/log/aptitude you clearly haven't read all of the above .. upping the log-level will make output on stderr more garrulous, but never log to that file. Out of curiosity: which problem are you trying to solve by writing these to a log file?

Thank you. I'm trying to avoid a repeat of the incident I documented in the OP - that is, losing information concerning a package that may not have been updated properly...

And just to be perfectly clear: @Digger don't use /var/log/aptitude with the --log-file=<file> flag, pick a different name!

Got it! FYI, I've updated the OP.

@Digger And if the solution offered answers that, feel free to accept ...

@tink In the man page, I don't understand the reference to <category>. I've searched the Aptitude manual but can't find an answer...

Scroll down to facilities linuxjournal.com/article/5476 ... unfortunately the nomenclature between different linux tools is not consistent.

@Digger - I've edited my post, there's now a walk-through at the bottom.

Thank you! I'm presuming that Aptitude::Logging::Levels "*:info"; captures information about ALL of Aptitude's various categories/facilities. Would this be correct?

That is correct indeed.

I'm about ready to wrap this up. The Aptitude::Logging::Levels "*:info"; line in the conf file did not capture information level information. I'm just going to go with the command line options. aptitude --log-file=foo.log --log-level=info I'm assuming I'll still get all categories/facilities captured...

And I did some more digging because the fact that none but the two levels mentioned in the man-page are documented anywhere ...

And good on yah ...

Maybe there was no info output to be had.

If you're curious which categories aptitude supports, do an apt-get source aptitude and then look at aptitude-0.8.12/src/loggers.h ... ;)

We stepped on each other's posts. Just to clarify before I'm done, I'm assuming that aptitude --log-file=foo.log --log-level=info will capture information on all categories/facilities. Would this be correct?