Re: Help identify packages that multiarch support will break

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

On Thu, 2011-03-03 at 17:30:42 +0100, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 03, 2011 at 02:45:51PM +0100, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> > And the status file is not a public interface. It's a file used by dpkg.
> > If tomorrow dpkg supports an optional SQLite internal database through a
> > plugin, dpkg-query will continue to work but your access to the status
> > file will not. (This is unlikely to happen any time soon, but you get the
> > idea)
> 
> Is there a way to ask dpkg-query to dump all the information contained
> in /var/lib/dpkg/status without either having to: (1) list all fields
> explicitly (using --show + --showformat)

For each package --status will do the trick, for all packages, yeah
it does not support patterns. I guess adding that would be fine. So
one could do something like: «dpkg-query -s '*'».

> or (2) list all package names (using --status)?

Currently something like «dpkg-query -l|tr -s ' ' '\t'|cut -f2» could
do the trick, altough I could agree it sucks a bit. If --status would
accept patterns that would be nicer.

> Having the ability to pass a package (wildcard) pattern to --show would
> be enough to solve this problem.

> Do you want a bug report about this?

Yes, please.

thanks,
guillem