Re: querying install times on packages

[Will Trillich <will@serensoft.com>]

On Mon, Jun 21 at 12:09PM -0500, Rob Benton wrote:
> Recently I ran into a problem on my machine at home.  I had
> made an update of several packages and something went wrong.
> What I need is a way to query all installed packages by their
> install date.  I couldn't find any existing tools like
> dselect, synaptic, or aptitude that would let me do this.  The
> only thing I can think of is writing a perl script using the
> output of `dpkg -s` on every installed package.  This would
> take a long time for sure.  I didn't see any packages or docs
> on functions used inside dpkg.  Is there another way to do
> this b/c I don't want to re-invent the wheel.

hmm.

	$ dpkg -s apache-perl
	Package: apache-perl
	Status: install ok installed
	Priority: extra
	Section: web
	Installed-Size: 584
	Maintainer: Daniel Jacobowitz <dan@debian.org>
	Version: 1.3.26-1-1.26-0woody2
	Provides: httpd
	Depends: libc6 (>= 2.2.4-4), libdb2 (>= 2:2.7.7.0-7), libperl5.6 (>= 5.6.1-7), mime-support, apache-common (>= 1.3.26), apache-common (<< 1.3.27), libapache-mod-perl (>= 1.26), libapache-mod-perl (<< 1.27), debconf, dpkg (>> 1.9.0)
	Recommends: apache
	Conffiles:
	 /etc/init.d/apache-perl b3b9823d1e0348bfa7a91d0a5c18af65
	 /etc/cron.daily/apache-perl 2486e8768557a71272a07a4df1461775
	 /etc/apache-perl/cron.conf 2a02b56717b0f3a3d3566344d8c37b48
	Description: Versatile, high-performance HTTP server with
	 <yada yada>

i see installed-size, status: installed... but no
installed-time...

if there were one, hobbling a perl script to parse it would be
reasonably trivial (except for parsing date strings, and there's
libraries to help with that).

-- 
I use Debian/GNU Linux version 3.0;
Linux boss 2.4.18-bf2.4 #1 Son Apr 14 09:53:28 CEST 2002 i586 unknown
 
DEBIAN NEWBIE TIP #103 from Dave Sherohman <esper@sherohman.org>
:
Trying to CREATE A CRONTAB FOR THE LAST DAY OF THE MONTH?  Best
to put all the logic within the crontab itself (a Good Thing,
since you then only have to look in one place to find it):
	1 0 28-31 * * [ "$(date +%d -d +1day)" -eq "1" ] && /path/to/script args

Also see http://newbieDoc.sourceForge.net/ ...