OK, I've started playing with the idea of writing a web front-end to apt-get and got stuck at the first hurdle...
Ideally I want to mimic the action of update-manager, ie get a list of updates, display the list (ideally with some details of each update), provide checkboxes to select required updates, and provide a mechanism to install the selected updates.
How do I generate a machine friendly list of available updates? Reading the apt-get docs, it suggests that apt-get -u update .. should do this, but it doesn't. (-u, aka --show-upgraded, should list upgraded packages). Various other stabs in the dark have also been fruitless.
Obviously I'm not tied to using apt-get; if aptitude or some other package manager gets me closer that's fine.