Re: dpkg.log

[Robert Stone <talby@trap.mtview.ca.us>]

Ben,
	I put together a package that essentially diffs the status file
nightly to generate a list of package installations and removals.  It
doesn't give you exact times, but it's much cleaner than requiring changes
to every package in debian, and doesn't require source changes to dpkg. 
You can find it at http://www.debian.org/~talby/ as dpkg-log.
	Although honestly I think this really should be a change to dpkg
if we need more resoloution that nightly change reports.  If each package
independently logs its install, the reports will be unreliable.  Changes
to apt/dselect are also the wrong place to make modifications because I
think most of us have used dpkg directly to install a package here and
there, and these installs would be missed.

						thanks,
						Robert

On Thu, 31 Dec 1998, Ben Collins wrote:

> How would having packages send their install messages to
> /var/log/dpkg.log sound? It's pretty easy for a maintainer to just add
> '>> /var/log/dpkg.log' to the end of their output lines in postinst
> etc. Plus it let's the admin go back and see anything that may be
> important that usually just flies by the screen during huge upgrades
> and installs. Something like this:
> 
> # postinst for foo
> 
> echo foo: `date` >> /var/log/dpkg.log
> echo foo: Edit default settings in /etc/foo.conf >> /var/log/dpkg.log
> 
> # end postinst for foo
> 
> This also wouldn't require dpkg to be modified, just a policy change.
>