On Sat, 20 Jun 2015 10:25:15 AM zlinw@mcmedia.com.au wrote:

I am NOT dreamming this up, I did an apt-get update followed by an apt dist-upgrade to check this out,and the val/lib/dpkg/availibilty file was not touched

My wild guess is that you're looking at the atime of the file, and if your kernel has relatime set (which has been the default for a while) then that won't get updated if the file hasn't been modified since the last time anything accessed it (unless it's a day or more since the last access, when it will get updated). In other words, if you use dpkg and friends to check if it's modified and then use apt to scan it (without modification) then you probably won't see atime updated and so without using strace to see what apt is doing you'll never know. You'll need to remount the filesystem with atime to have all atime updates recorded. Best of luck, Chris -- Chris Samuel : http://www.csamuel.org/ : Melbourne, VIC