rpm -q –changelog in Debian | on IRC (or adventures in the land of #ubuntu)
Today, I had a problem. I’d been used to doing rpm -q --changelog <packagename> and generally piping that through less. I sat at a Ubuntu terminal, and wondered how to do this. Poring through the man pages for apt-get or even dpkg, proved worthless. So, I hopped on to #ubuntu on Freenode, to have a rather enlightening conversation:
Oct 11 10:11:37 <ccharles> hi! does anyone here know the dpkg/apt equivalent to rpm -q --changelog ?
Oct 11 10:12:10 <Pelo> ccharles, man apt and man dpkg see what it says
Oct 11 10:12:46 <ccharles> Pelo: you'd think i had already tried that, and failed, which is why i came here
At which point, I’m wondering what the clue-level of the channel is. So I hop onto #luv, the channel for my local LUG, and ask there. Not long after, I post this back on #ubuntu:
Oct 11 10:34:19 <ccharles> pelo: the correct answer next time, is apt-listchanges, or even zless /usr/share/doc/<packagename>/changelog.Debian.gz or if you have internet access, aptitude changelog <packagename> (with thanks to cafuego for telling me)
I remember in my active Fedora days, we used to refer to #fedora as a bit of a wasteland, largely populated by meat-heads. However, it was also the primary contact point for non-meat-heads, for a non-development question. And a lot of folk on #fedora-devel never ever joined #fedora. This is probably largely the same with #ubuntu/#ubuntu-devel. This creates a disconnect within the community.
rpm -q –changelog equivalents on Debian
- apt-listchanges is written by an Ubuntite (is that what they’re called?), and requires installing. It also requires access to the package .deb, which seemed counter-intuitive.
- aptitude changelog <packagename> – useful, but seems redundant. It connects to the Internet to fetch this data for you, chewing up your bandwidth, and requiring you to have Internet access
- zless /usr/share/doc/<packagename>/changelog.Debian.gz – the winner, quite clearly. No Internet access required, it pulls directly off your disk, and its all in less
However, RPM still seems to shine quite this bit more, in comparison. Maybe someone wants to update the Switching to Ubuntu From Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Fedora guide.
Technorati Tags: fedora, ubuntu, rpm, dpkg, apt, changelog, apt-listchanges, aptitude, irc, community
See also the forum vs mailing list divide, and Ubuntu appointing people to bring issues from the forums to the attention of the developers.
@James: is that true? well, i think the problem ubuntu faces is that they’ve targeted the end-user. and end-users don’t want to report bugs, etc. they now for the large part visit forums, rather than even mailing lists
developers, on the other hand, live and breathe out of their SCMs, a terminal, and a bugs database. this is where fedora gets it right – their target has always been freedom and an on-going moving development tree.
oh well. i do wish ubuntu the best of successes as its gotta be one of the best linux distributions since sliced bread
Yes, it is – see their forum post and pages linked therein.
As a hard-core Debian user I was initially quite pleased with Ubuntu, but as time goes on this is fading, for two reasons. First is Debian etch is really quite a nice release (in part no doubt due to things stolen from Ubuntu) and for the first time ever I haven’t upgraded to testing shortly after release. Secondly is the increasing amount of crack going into Ubuntu that turns it from a Debian derivative into a distribution that just uses the same package format. The opaqueness of Ubuquity (no docs, the source location isn’t obvious); lib{pam,nss}-ldap now use a common file, like upstream but unlike Debian, and the README.Debian (another useful file in /usr/share/doc/package) files still reference the Debian names; the change in the way locales are handled; and so on. Sometimes you can fall back to the Debian way, sometimes you can’t, but half these changes aren’t properly documented. Or maybe I just don’t follow Ubuntu development closely enough.
I never learned all the flags of rpm which is possibly why I didn’t like FC2. Now that Core and Extras have merged Fedora is looking more promising, but it doesn’t offer any compelling reason to switch. Particularly not from Debian, where “install once, upgrade forever” is an unofficial release goal.