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

[Mike Hommey]

On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 01:11:16AM +0100, Sandro Tosi wrote:
> 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.

Looks like things are happening
http://justimho.blogspot.com/2011/02/let-me-introduce-dpkglog-and-dpkg.html

Mike