On Mon, 28 Jun 1999, Bruce Sass wrote: > These methods only work reliably if one uses dselect or apt. > > The philosophical/political/religious status of Debian packages is > usually only found in the Packages files, those of us who don't use the > package fetching tools (too much overhead for me) do not have this > information handy unless we specifically went and downloaded the > Packages files. > > So... until Debian makes the "status" field required (as in included in > the .deb) or someone rewrites VRMS to prompt for a CD or to actually go > looking for Packages files on the 'net... > > Hmmm, > does VRMS report when it can not determine the status of a package.
Um, very wrong. /var/lib/dpkg/status is on ALL debian systems, no matter what. It contains the status of currently installed pkgs. dpkg-awk and grep-status parse this file. Adam ps: On a side note, dpkg-awk can parse any dpkg database file, including the available file, and the package file.
