Re: "dpkg --status" not sufficient.

[Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu>]

Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@gpu.srv.ualberta.ca> writes:

> For some time I have been thinking about finding someone to write an
> 'apt-info' program that would do basically what dpkg-awk, dpkg-perl
> and all the various dpkg query functions in some way that was
> usefull for the things we actually need.
> 
> I'm not going to write this, but if someone is interested I would be
> able to help.

As a simple step, why couldn't we just start with 

  apt-info --status <regex>

which takes a perl regular expresion, and spews *exactly* whatever you
would have gotten at that instant from "dpkg --status pkgname" for
each matching package name?

Of course, unless libdpkg (or whatever) is much faster than just
calling dpkg directly, then there's no reason to do this.  The tool
must be able to produce the fields like "Config-Version: 1.0.1", but I
presume that that'll just be part of the normal status when it's
applicable.

One thing I thought might be nice is something like a "find" for
packages where you could say something like:

  find-pkg --name ".*gnome.*" \( --desc ".*game.* --or --desc ".*fish.*" \)
    --print '${name}: ${desc_short}\n'

or something like that.

-- 
Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930


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