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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