Re: Looking for collaborator with Debian experience

[Chuck Peters <cp@linux.ccil.org>]

With Debian an upgrade can be acomplished with 2 commands.

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

You do have to wait for the download using this method and having
something like harvester would be very useful for me. 

On Tue, 4 May 1999, Eric S. Raymond wrote:

> I maintain a utility called `harvester' that can be taught how to poll
> web pages and FTP directories and download package updates from them,
> sending notification mail to the administrator.  The utility is
> written in Python, and presently detects and downloads RPMs reliably.
> It does as little work as possible; each potential download is checked
> against the lists of already-installed and already-downloaded RPMs.
> 
> I use harvester to pull down any pending updates from the Red Hat and
> GNOME pages at 0400 each morning.
> 
> I'm seeking a collaborator familiar with the Debian package system to
> assist me in enhancing harvester so that it can do the same service
> for Debian packages.   I need the following things:
> 
> 1. To know the Debian equivalent of `rpm -qa'.

dpkg -l lists all installed packages, but this output may be a bit messier
than you want. 

$ dpkg -l
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge
| Status=Not/Installed/Config-files/Unpacked/Failed-config/Half-installed
|/ Err?=(none)/Hold/Reinst-required/X=both-problems (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name            Version        Description
+++-===============-==============-============================================
ii  3dchess         0.8.1-3        3D chess for X11
rc  a2ps            4.10.3-1       Anything to PostScript converter and pretty-
ii  aalib1          1.2-8          ascii art library
ii  acroread        3.02-0.1       Adobe Acrobat Reader: Portable Document Form
  
> 2. To understand the conventions used for naming .deb files, so I can
>    write regexps to parse them.

The debian pachage gnome-stones_0.30-5.deb is debian revision 5 of
gnome-stones .30. 
The version number format is:
[epoch/:]upstream-version[-/debian-revision].   See
http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/packaging.html/ch-versions.html
for more details.

> 3. Someone to test harvester under Debian.

I'd be willing to try it.  However I will check and make sure it's not
something Debian already has.  

I would like to create the Debian package as well, that way I can finally
become a Debian developer!

Thanks,
Chuck


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