Hi there
On 11/04/2026 09:24, Rob van der Putten wrote:
On 11/04/2026 00:35, Nick Morrott wrote:
On Tue, 7 Apr 2026 at 10:20, Rob van der Putten <[email protected]> wrote:
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 $2}'
The first half of the query above uses rmadison to retrieve details
about asterisk in Debian unstable; the second half uses awk to extract
the version number (the second pipe-delimited field) and trim
leading/trailing spaces for further use in your script.
This is _VERY_ convenient, even without the AWK bit!
Thanks!
And if you use an bullseye asterisk on a bookworm box, a '-u qa' will
give you security info as well;
~$ rmadison -s bullseye-security -a amd64 -u qa asterisk
asterisk | 1:16.28.0~dfsg-0+deb11u9 | bullseye-security | amd64
Regards,
Rob
