I tried to send this directly to Ian J., but I have not yet heard back from him, so I'll send it to him (and all of the Debian developers while I'm at it) via debian-devel.
Ian, In working on the dbackup program, I find that I need to be able to determine the installation date (& time) of a package. As a stopgap measure, I was using the date that the /var/lib/dpkg/info/<package>.list was last modified. This is unworkable as that file's modification date will change. Could you add an ``Installed:'' field to the package status database and put in that field the date and time (down to the second, at least) that the package was installed. Thank You, David P.S. My program is reading the status file without support from dpkg. If you ever change the database structure, dbackup will fail to work. Perhaps an interface could be provided (dpkg-database?) which would provide certain types of information depending on the arguments specified. -- David H. Silber [EMAIL PROTECTED] Project: Debian GNU/Linux (dbackup) <http://www.access.digex.net/~dhs/> Wanted: Spare time. Programmer for hire.
