To ease the packaging of python modules, extensions and applications, some extra meta information should be added to packages building python modules, extensions and applications. This information says something about for which python versions the package should be built and which python versions can be used with this package. The new metadata can be kept either in a separate db/file or as a user attribute in the control file. Having a separate db doesn't allow to work with the existing packaging tools, and you have to look at the content of packages when you want to know something over the package. The added attribute moves this information in reach of the packaging tools. Accessing this kind of information in the postinst/prerm is possible, but comes for a price: speed of dpkg. This can be accelerated by directly accessing the status file or using tools like grep-dctrl to access the status file. Steve Langasek pointed out that the status file is internal do dpkg and may change without notice. Is it safe to assume that dpkg will either provide a backward compatible way to access this data, and/or that another method to access this data will be provided? The task in this case is to find a subset of packages with the new meta information, when doing an update to the another python version.
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