listing updated packages only
Panu Matilainen
pmatilai at laiskiainen.org
Mon Nov 13 01:24:30 PST 2006
On Sat, 11 Nov 2006, Gary L. Greene, Jr. wrote:
> Going through past conversations on the list....
Been a tad quiet around here, huh :)
> I think with regard to a update-checker run via cron, stand-alone GUI tools,
> or some tray applet in KDE/GNOME, a plain output of package names would work
> in the beginning. What I'd LOVE to see is the RPM change-log or some such be
> packed into the apt cached DB. Then we could have the lua script do the list
> with the following format:
>
> [PACKAGE_NAME]\t[STRING_CONTAINING_MOST_RECENT_CHANGE_LOG_ENTRY]\n
>
> Then it can be parsed by external tools, like the script that Vincent was
> working with or the package install tools I and Logan are working on.
Enabling access to package changelogs is a longstanding thing on my
todo-list (hmm, seems to missing from the roadmap, added now...)
Technically, getting the changelogs out of rpmlib is easy. From there on
it gets nastier.
- Old style apt repositories dont carry changelog data at all, so to
access the changelog the whole package would need to be downloaded.
- Repomd puts changelogs into the "other.xml.gz" file, which tends to be
huge and needs to be downloaded fully to access any packages changelog. As
apt can't do "download on demand" of the repository data the huge file
would need to be downloaded every time you do 'update', whether you need
the data or not.
- Speficying which instance of package data you want (eg one from rpmdb vs
one from a repository) is needlessly hard in apt itself, impossible (IIRC)
with current Lua interface. So the changelog data ends up being "so near
yet so far away"
Another related thing is that it's now possible to inject arbitrary
additional metadata into repomd. Starting with FC6, this is used by
yum/pirut/yum-updatesd to show "update information" which is separate from
the actual changelogs. I certainly want to support this as well, somehow.
So, essentially the thing is: accessing the changelog data is ridiculously
hard at the moment, largely due to apt's structure. Various roadblocks
need to be removed to make it sane first - but this certainly is pretty
high on my most-wanted things.
- Panu -
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