Bug#69969: I can't figure out how to do what I want to do.
Package: dpkg-python
Version: 0.1-4
Hi there! Thank you all very much for Debian, which is the best thing
going due to its hard-working package maintainers and its sophisticated
package tools!
I'm a developer of Mojo Nation, a new open source distributed file-
sharing system (http://mojohackers.org/). I want to integrate our
software with Debian, and I downloaded dpkg-python to that end, hoping to
find a method that takes a file as argument and returns a dict mapping
from fieldname to value.
I read a lot of the dpkg-python code and experimented a bit, calling
various `parse()' methods on my .deb files. I couldn't find one that did
what I wanted, and there wasn't any README, example usage code, or
in-line comments that I could find, so I gave up.
Hopefully dpkg-perl will have some doco indicating how to get the data
that I want! Then I'll mung it real quick to output something that looks
just like the repr() of a Python dict, which is the format I need. :-)
Anyway, before I go look at dpkg-perl, I thought that I should submit a
bug report.
Regards,
Zooko
P.S. I really spent a long time on this. I've tried many variations of
passing `dpkg_packages.read' as the second argument to `tar.parse_file()'
and other experiments. And I'm not inexperienced with Python nor
(usually) am I slow to understand.
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