EMTARGETCMP(1)

Name

emtargetcmp - Compare the Emdebian target repository with

Debian
unstable

Copyright and Licence

Copyright (C) 2007-2008 Neil Williams <codehelp@de

bian.org>

This package is free software; you can redistribute it

and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as

published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the Li

cense, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be

useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied war

ranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See

the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public

License
along with this program. If not, see

<http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

Bugs

A long standing bug in apt is that when switching archi

tecture or when
switching between repository sources, apt has a habit of

purging the
lists directory of whatever cache is being used. Despite

apt-cross
using -o APT::Get::List-Cleanup=off in all calls, this be

haviour has
returned in recent versions of apt.

To get around this, emtargetcmp now creates a temporary

directory,
copies the system cache, queries that and then removes the

copy. This
allows apt to use lock files and status files in the tem

porary
directory without requiring sudo. (The temporary directory

used is
$apt_cache_dir/host/.)

Description

emtargetcmp prepares cache data from the emdebian/emdebian

target cache
at buildd.emdebian.org against the Debian unstable cache

at
ftp.uk.debian.org for arm with support for mapping Emde

bian version
strings to Debian versions.

Uses ftk.uk.debian.org or ftp.de.debian.org due to loca

tion of
buildd.emdebian.org

One of the remaining issues with this approach is the ap

parent lack of
support for creating a sources.list in memory without

needing lots of
little files. Therefore emtargetcmp creates a special

sources list in
the apt-cross directory (e.g. ~/.apt-cross/) and switches

the content
of the file as necessary.

This small utility also serves as an example of what can

be done with
Cache::Apt::* from libcache-apt-perl.

Currently, emtargetcmp only supports ARM because Emdebian

only has a
root filesystem for ARM.

Output uses ANSIColor (where supported) so that packages

which are
older in Emdebian than in Debian are listed in red and

packages which
are the same version in Emdebian as in Debian (accounting

for the
emdebian version suffix) are shown in green. If, for what

ever reason,
Emdebian contains packages that are newer than in Debian,

these are
shown in blue.

Commands and options

-a|--arch

Override the dpkg-cross default architecture.

-v|--verbose

Make the output more verbose.

-q|--quiet

Make the output quieter.

perl v5.10.0 2008-08-20

EMTARGETCMP(1)