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.
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