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nealmcb
Asked: 2011-04-30 08:39:36 +0800 CST

Information on package versions from old releases?

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The http://packages.ubuntu.com/ site provides great information on packages, with changelogs and much more, but only covers currently supported releases.

The rmadison program (devscripts package) will also give me command-line access to all versions of a package from currently supported releases (nice!):

$ rmadison gnome-mount
gnome-mount | 0.8~svn20080225-0ubuntu4 |         hardy | source, amd64, i386
gnome-mount | 0.8-2ubuntu1 | karmic/universe | source, amd64, i386

But I don't see a way to find e.g. what version was in intrepid, which is no longer supported. I know the intrepid release is available at http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ but I don't want to have to go through each repository by hand.

package-management

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    If you have the Packages files from old-releases.ubuntu.com, you can use madison-lite to query them, much as you would use rmadison to query the archive Packages files remotely.

    To set this up, mirror http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/*/*/binary-*/* with your favourite mirroring tool. If you also want information about sources, also mirror http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/*/*/source

    Then set up a configuration file, for example:

    mirror /srv/mirror/old-releases/

    If you add nothing else to the configuration, it will tell you about every architecture for every release.

    To keep this up-to-date, you probably want to have a cron job that updates it somewhere in the beginning of December and June (because sometimes the migration of a release takes a little while).

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