On Tue, 7 Apr 2026 at 10:20, Rob van der Putten <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Hi there
>
>
> On 07/04/2026 09:23, Jan Claeys wrote:
>
> > On Tue, 2026-04-07 at 07:21 +0200, Rob van der Putten wrote:
> >> How do I keep tracks of changes in packages?
> >> I build my own packports and use a cron job to keep track of changes.
> >> Recently Debian started insisting on using JavaScript in your
> >> browser.
> >
> > That's probably protection against "AI" bots... :-(
>
> I found those in my logs as well.
>
> >> So, short of using a web driver - (headless) webbrowser combination,
> >> how do I keep track of changes?
> >
> > You don't say how & where you were looking now?
>
> packages.debian.org
> A shell script looks for changes in the package page and then mails me
> those changes.
>
> > One way is to look at updates based on the metadata in the
> > repositories, which should work without JavaScript.
>
> Downloading and processing Packages.gz does work.
> I just wrote a shell script that runs from cron.
> This is actually simpeler and works better.
Rob,
If you need to query a specific package's version in Debian, you can
use rmadison.
E.g. to get the version of asterisk in unstable/amd64:
rmadison -s unstable -a amd64 asterisk | \
awk 'BEGIN{FS=OFS="|"} {gsub(/^[ ]+|[ ]+$/, "", $2)} {print $2}'
The first half of the query above uses rmadison to retrieve details
about asterisk in Debian unstable; the second half uses awk to extract
the version number (the second pipe-delimited field) and trim
leading/trailing spaces for further use in your script.
Cheers,
Nick
