debtags and aptitude forget-new

I like to regularly go through the new packages section in aptitude to see what interesting new packages entered testing, but recently that joyful moment got less joyful for me because of a barrage of obscurely named packages.

I have just realised that aptitude forget-new supports search patterns, and that brought back the joy.

I put this in a script that I run before looking for new packages in aptitude:

aptitude forget-new '?tag(field::biology)
                   | ?tag(devel::lang:ruby)
                   | ?tag(devel::lang:perl)
                   | ?tag(role::shared-lib)
                   | ?tag(suite::openstack)
                   | ?tag(implemented-in::php)
                   | ~n^node-'

The actual content of the search pattern is purely a matter of taste.

I'm happy to see how debtags becomes quite useful here, to keep my own user experience manageable as the size of Debian keeps growing.

Update: pabs suggested to use apt post-invoke hooks. For example:

        $ cat /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99forget-new
        APT::Update::Post-Invoke { "aptitude forget-new '~sdebug'"; };