Re: Proposal of new control field: Date

[jidanni@jidanni.org]

>> Imagine, "freshness dating available right there on the grocer's
>> shelf, in Packages.gz. No need for the consumer to jump through
>> additional hoops to find out."

PW> Which date would it contain?

The date the maintainer made the polishing touches on the .deb.
That way one could tell, even when offline, if a package hasn't been
updated in ten years.

Well OK, assuming network connections, one can always just do e.g.,
$ apt-get -yyqq --print-uris install abiword|
   perl -F\' -alnwe 'print $F[1]'|xargs --verbose -n 1 HEAD -P|grep -i Last-Modified
HEAD -P http://ftp.tw.debian.org/debian/pool/main/libv/libvoikko/libvoikko1_2.0-1_i386.deb
Last-Modified: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:02:17 GMT
HEAD -P http://ftp.tw.debian.org/debian/pool/main/libg/libgsf/libgsf-gnome-1-114_1.14.11-2_i386.deb
Last-Modified: Fri, 30 Jan 2009 17:47:03 GMT

But the same could be said about some of the other fields, like Size.
Just do another HEAD to get the Size. But OK, Size is more important
than Date, so it gets a field in Packages.gz.