When packages are installed.

[dhs@firefly.com (David H. Silber)]

I tried to send this directly to Ian J., but I have not yet heard back from
him, so I'll send it to him (and all of the Debian developers while I'm at
it) via debian-devel.


Ian,

In working on the dbackup program, I find that I need to be able to determine
the installation date (& time) of a package.  As a stopgap measure, I was
using the date that the /var/lib/dpkg/info/<package>.list was last modified.
This is unworkable as that file's modification date will change.

Could you add an ``Installed:'' field to the package status database and
put in that field the date and time (down to the second, at least) that the
package was installed.

Thank You,
David

P.S.  My program is reading the status file without support from dpkg.  If
you ever change the database structure, dbackup will fail to work.  Perhaps
an interface could be provided (dpkg-database?) which would provide certain
types of information depending on the arguments specified.

-- 
  David H. Silber     dhs@firefly.com     Project: Debian GNU/Linux (dbackup)
  <http://www.access.digex.net/~dhs/>     Wanted:  Spare time.

			     Programmer for hire.