Debian question

[Benjamin Scott]

On Mon, 14 Feb 2005, at 1:14pm, michael.odonnell at comcast.net wrote:
> I'm still not quite sure what y'all are looking for.

  I'm pretty sure Bruce is looking for a way to say this:

	rpm -qa --qf '%{INSTALLTIME} %{NAME}\n' | sort -nr | head -50

in Debianese.

  For those who don't know hatspeak, the above tells RPM to query (-q) all
(-a) packages, and use a query output format (--qf) consisting of the time
the package was installed (seconds since epoch) and the name.  That gets
piped through a reverse sort filter, giving us most recent installs first,
and then "head -50" just gives us the 50 most recent packages.

> If you want a tool that generates reports like "on this date you installed
> this pkg, which touched these files, and then on this date you deinstalled
> this pkg, which touched these files, and then on this date you reinstalled
> this pkg but aborted the operation part way through, so these files are
> now zorched, then on this date you down-revved this pkg so these files got
> reverted, etc, etc" then I suspect you're out of luck.  If any
> distribution offers capabilities like that I'll be impressed.

  Not that RPM really does anything like that, but the following may be
useful to someone:

  For better or worse, RPM doesn't let multiple packages install the same
file, so knowing a package was installed or removed tells you what files
were affected.  RPM does take pains to use a "transactional" approach to
things, so that a soft abort (e.g., SIGTERM) doesn't leave the system in an
inconsistent state.  (SIGKILL and power loss are rather more difficult.)

  Recent hat-systems also keep a list of the currently installed packages in
/var/log/rpm, which gets rotated by logrotate.  That is kind of a poor man's
history.  Very poor.

  I'd like it a lot more if rpm just logged things to syslog.

-- 
Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
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