Re: Interfaces for dpkg/deb packages

[Michael Vogt <mvo@debian.org>]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2005 at 02:40:06PM -0700, Christopher Crammond wrote:
> I was curious as to where I might be able to find out what
> non-command-line interfaces into .deb packages are available.  For
> instance, is there a C interface that could pull out information such as
> Name, Version, Release, etc... ?
[..]

libapt_inst (from the apt package) provides a interface in C++ and
python-apt (module apt_inst) provides a interface in python.

Attached is a example using python-apt.

Cheers,
 Michael

-- 
Linux is not The Answer. Yes is the answer. Linux is The Question. - Neo

#!/usr/bin/env python
# some example for apt_inst

import apt_pkg
import apt_inst
import sys

def Callback(What,Name,Link,Mode,UID,GID,Size,MTime,Major,Minor):
    """ callback for debExtract """
    
    print "%s '%s','%s',%u,%u,%u,%u,%u,%u,%u"\
          % (What,Name,Link,Mode,UID,GID,Size, MTime, Major, Minor);


if __name__ == "__main__":
    if len(sys.argv) < 2:
        print "need filename argumnet"
        sys.exit(1)
    file = sys.argv[1]

    print "Working on: %s" % file
    print "Displaying data.tar.gz:"
    apt_inst.debExtract(open(file), Callback, "data.tar.gz")

    print "Now extracting the control file:"
    control = apt_inst.debExtractControl(open(file))
    sections = apt_pkg.ParseSection(control)
    print sections

    print "Maintainer is: "
    print sections["Maintainer"]

    print
    print "DependsOn: "
    depends = sections["Depends"]
    print apt_pkg.ParseDepends(depends)