Do we need this crap on LWN? [LWN.net]

Do we need this crap on LWN?

Posted Feb 21, 2007 19:48 UTC (Wed) by vondo (guest, #256)
In reply to: Do we need this crap on LWN? by evgeny
Parent article: ESR's goodbye note

Since we've got deb experts reading this... The thing I miss from rpm days that I don't know how to do in deb/apt is:

rpm -qa --last

Give me a list of all the packages installed and order them by the last time they were updated.

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dpkg magic

Posted Feb 21, 2007 20:55 UTC (Wed) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

I don't think a capability like that is built in, but try this:
ls -ltr /var/lib/dpkg/info/*.list | sed -e 's,^.*/\([^/]*\)\.list,\1,'

dpkg magic

Posted Feb 21, 2007 22:06 UTC (Wed) by jonabbey (subscriber, #2736) [Link]

Ah, but what would Eric say about such an unfriendly, regressive, inward-focused approach to software design?

Okay, yeah, sorry, I've got nothing.

Do we need this crap on LWN?

Posted Feb 22, 2007 5:46 UTC (Thu) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

Until _quite_ recently this was completely impossible. Really. No records were kept at all.

Now that dpkg keeps a log, someone could at least write such a thing, although I don't think one exists yet.

dpkg log

Posted Feb 22, 2007 14:41 UTC (Thu) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

the ls/sed hack I posted above works on Debian sarge, which (although current stable)
isn't exactly "quite recent". No need for the dpkg log. And as far as I can see, recent
dpkg only keeps a log if you explicitly tell it to anyway. (Though I could be missing
something more recent.)

dpkg log

Posted Feb 22, 2007 18:21 UTC (Thu) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

Buh, I didn't look at the criteria closely. I've often needed a log and found the 'most recent update' information was too lossy.

Do we need this crap on LWN?

Posted Feb 22, 2007 16:49 UTC (Thu) by akumria (subscriber, #7773) [Link]

Something like:

eve:[~]% sudo tail /var/log/dpkg.log
2007-02-22 06:33:35 status half-configured ttf-farsiweb 0.4.dfsg-6
2007-02-22 06:33:36 status unpacked git 4.3.20-10
2007-02-22 06:33:36 status half-configured git 4.3.20-10
2007-02-22 06:33:37 status installed git 4.3.20-10
2007-02-22 06:51:26 status half-configured dhcp3-server 3.0.4-13
2007-02-22 06:51:29 status half-configured ttf-farsiweb 0.4.dfsg-6
2007-02-22 06:52:35 status half-configured dhcp3-server 3.0.4-13
2007-02-22 06:52:37 status installed dhcp3-server 3.0.4-13
2007-02-22 06:52:37 status half-configured ttf-farsiweb 0.4.dfsg-6

perhaps?