Bug#933609: How hard it is to find the Date of a package

[積丹尼 Dan Jacobson <jidanni@jidanni.org>]

Package: www.debian.org

Let's examine how extremely hard it is for a user to squeeze update date
of a package he is thinking of installing out of the Debian system.

First of all update dates are not part of any Package* file. So forget
apt, etc.

Now we must turn to the web.

Case in point:

"Should we install webext-ublock-origin, or get it from the Chrome web
store. I know, let's see which is newer!" #933608

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm
says says "Updated July 25, 2019"

That was simple.

OK, let's turn to Debian.

https://www.google.com/search?q=webext-ublock-origin leads to
https://packages.debian.org/sid/web/webext-ublock-origin
from where we must know to click on "all",
https://packages.debian.org/sid/all/webext-ublock-origin/download

There we see
  More information on webext-ublock-origin_1.19.0+dfsg-2_all.deb:
  Exact Size	1617728 Byte (1.5 MByte)
  MD5 checksum	190c7c66089925f72489624d700c34a0
  SHA1 checksum	Not Available
  SHA256 checksum	bf50b4180ba0daddd720b5ce1702a315ed7743cc749ebb3cc131fe60dcc648c9

but Date is still not included.

So we must copy a link, and run HEAD on it,

$ HEAD http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/u/ublock-origin/webext-ublock-origin_1.19.0+dfsg-2_all.deb
200 OK
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 01 Aug 2019 01:17:03 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: "5d22808b-18af40"
Server: nginx/1.13.6
Content-Length: 1617728
Content-Type: application/octet-stream
Last-Modified: Sun, 07 Jul 2019 23:30:19 GMT
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Ah, finally!

But let's say we are not as smart.

So we must shorten the link:

http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/u/ublock-origin/

Then click Last Modified (twice), then look for the file we want...