[Dctrl-tools-devel] Bug#511233: Idiom to specify parts of the archive to grep-dctrl against

Adeodato Simó dato at net.com.org.es
Thu Jan 8 17:56:49 UTC 2009


Package: dctrl-tools,devscripts
Severity: wishlist
X-Debbugs-CC: debian-devel at lists.debian.org

Hello,

for my line of work (heh) I regularly have to run grep-dctrl against the
Packages/Sources files for a combination of arches and suites. Since
I've always found specifying the paths to those files a pain, I've been
a long-time user of a small wrapper script [1] that concisely takes
SUITE(S):COMPONENT(S):ARCH(ES) as its first argument, and pipes the
appropriate files to grep-dctrl.

That script works nice on machines with a local mirror. At home, where I
don't have one, I've gone with a symlink farm in /org pointing to files
in /var/lib/apt/lists. I've wanted to extend the script to use directly
apt's files if a mirror is not available, but I never got around to it
(it's a bash script).

Additionally, I've been told by some people they don't think a wrapper
script is an appropriate solution, and they thought putting support for
this in grep-dctrl directly would be better.

Personally, I don't care where it is. I just want a Debian idiom to
specify what to grep-dctrl against, one that works in every machine,
using a local mirror if available, resorting to apt's files if not.

So, I'd like to hear from the dctrl-tools maintainers if they think
such an idiom has a place in grep-dctrl itself, or they think it'd
be better maintained in devscripts. A hypothetical use would be:

    % grep-dctrl -M testing:main,contrib:ALL -FDepends libtdb1

I'd also like to hear from the devscripts maintainers if they think a
wrapper for this purpose would be allowed in devscripts and
(particularly) if any of them would be up to write it, since sadly I
would not be able to provide an implementation in Perl (only in Python).
  
Thanks in advance,

  [1]: http://git.debian.org/?p=tools-release/release.git;a=blob_plain;f=scripts/grep-archive;hb=HEAD

-- 
Adeodato Simó                                     dato at net.com.org.es
Debian Developer                                  adeodato at debian.org
 
La música es de los que la quieren escuchar y de nadie más.
                -- Andrés Calamaro






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