[Reportbug-maint] Bug#548415: reportbug: Package upgrade information in bug reports

[Sandro Tosi]

On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 08:03, Mike Hommey <mh at glandium.org> wrote:
> I, for one, don't care very much about the dependency, but more about
> the fact that not having it installed could mean not being able to pull
> the information, even by installing afterwards. A dpkg.log parser would
> always work, except when the logs are rotated and old enough to have
> been removed.

I tend to agree with Mike here: a log parser would be very nice, like something

dpkg-log last_ops <package>

<N> <op_N, like purge install remove etc> <package> <version>
<N-1> <op_N-1> <package> <version> (<prev_version> if needed)
<N-2> <op_N-2> <package> <version>
<N-3> <op_N-3> <package> <version>
<N-4> <op_N-4> <package> <version>

or a series of other interesting commands.

Default logrotate configuration keeps a year of log, so we have quite
a bit of room even for the very lazy bug reporters :)

What I'd like to avoid (with the reportbug maint hat on) is to let
reportbug parse a log file (either dpkg or xapian) to extract the info
it needs.

Cheers,
-- 
Sandro Tosi (aka morph, morpheus, matrixhasu)
My website: http://matrixhasu.altervista.org/
Me at Debian: http://wiki.debian.org/SandroTosi