According to man apt
,
list (work-in-progress)
list is somewhat similar to dpkg-query --list in that it can display a
list of packages satisfying certain criteria. It supports glob(7)
patterns for matching package names as well as options to list
installed (--installed), upgradeable (--upgradeable) or all
available (--all-versions) versions.
But, in at least two cases, hunspell
(see https://askubuntu.com/a/1036619/248158 for the output) and libreoffice
, the apt list --all-versions
list is far longer:
apt list --all-versions | grep -E "^hunspell"
apt list --all-versions | grep -E "^libreoffice"
result in far more hits than
dpkg -l hunspell*
dpkg -l libreoffice*
(dpkg-query --list
gives the same output as dpkg -l
.)
Best Answer
dpkg
can only provide information about what it knows, which is limited to packages and versions that had somedpkg
operation applied to them.apt
, on the other hand, has far more information - it includes everything in the package lists it gets from repositories. Obviously it's unlikely thatdpkg
operations have been done for most available packages and versions, and so of course the output ofdpkg-query
does not include those and is, hence, limited.