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Jonas Czech
Asked: 2018-03-16 11:08:09 +0800 CST

Find which versions of Ubuntu a package in a 3rd-party repository is available for?

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I have a link to a 3rd party package repository, for example something like this:

http://eddie.website/repository/apt stable main

There is a particular package available from this repository (for example, one of the packages in this repo is airvpn).

How can I find out which versions of Ubuntu this particular package (and, similarly, other packages from any other 3rd party repos) is built for ?

I'd like to do this to find out if software I'm using already available on 18.04, or which older versions of Ubuntu are still supported by the software. It seems like I need to look at the "release" files in the repository, how do I get to them, and where is the info I need ?

package-management repository apt versions software-sources

2 Answers

  1. Repos are structured to have the release name in the 'dists' folder.

    For example, the deb line deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main will pull in packages from http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/dists/wheezy/main/.

    To find out what releases a repo supports, you can normally just navigate to the dists folder of that repo (in this case http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/dists/) in a web browser, which will display the directory listing.

    As you mentioned, you can also gather additional information from the Release file within the dist folder. Using http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/dists/wheezy/Release as an example, we can see that this dist is for the Debian release codenamed 'wheezy', which corresponds to version 7.11. You can also see the supported architectures and components from their respective fields.

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  2. I would say there is no simple answer to your question. Not all repo's are structured by the Ubuntu release (and they shouldn't be, since some apps work on various distributions). Having all of this in mind, one can check the the app version by apt cache. In your case: if eddie.website is in your ppa you can always do apt-cache policy airvpn or apt-cache show airvpn or apt-cache showpkg airvpn. This will yield version of the package and some basic info about it.

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