Compare two repos - a table of all all package versions?

Question

I'd like to see and compare versions of all packages in two different repos. Something like:

libfoo | 1.2 | 1.3 libbar | 2.4 | 3.0 libbaz | ... | ...

Is there some such web?

Or a way to obtain list of all package versions in a repo, so I could compare myself by a script?

The use case is to be able to know what versions will change after system upgrade.

Answer 1

Use the tool rmadison for one package version information in different distributions (well then different repositories)

1. sudo apt-get install devscripts
2. rmadison [the package name]

For example,

$ rmadison alsa-utils

and the output looks like [package version distro arch]:

 alsa-utils | 1.0.25-1ubuntu5   | precise         | source, amd64, armel, armhf, i386, powerpc
 alsa-utils | 1.0.25-1ubuntu5.2 | precise-updates | source, amd64, armel, armhf, i386, powerpc
 alsa-utils | 1.0.27.2-1ubuntu2 | trusty          | source, amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, powerpc, ppc64el
 alsa-utils | 1.0.28-1ubuntu2   | vivid           | source, amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, powerpc, ppc64el
 alsa-utils | 1.0.29-0ubuntu1   | wily            | source, amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, powerpc, ppc64el

Or you could go to this website to see the lists

http://packages.ubuntu.com/

Answer 2

You can visit Ubuntuupdates as follows:

Search according to packages:

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Then click Package Search (you will find differnt versions in page such as shown below):

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You can also find possible matches of package name according to version and then click anyone to know more details!

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Here package names are only used as example. Hope this helps to find appropriate package-name + PPA according to Ubuntu-release.

Answer 3

For two different repositories, you can compare the Packages files. This file is specific to the release channel (trusty, trusty-updates, etc.), the component (main, multiverse, etc.) and the type of the packages (binary-amd64, source, etc.).

Typically you can locate the file at:

/ubuntu/dists/$CHANNEL/$COMPONENT/binary-$ARCH/Packages{,.gz,.bz2,.xz}

relative to the root of most official mirrors.

An example would be http://mirror.cse.iitk.ac.in/ubuntu/dists/precise/main/binary-amd64/Packages.gz

You can fetch the Packages files you're interested in (uncompress if necessary), grep for Package and Version, then diff the output.

A sample code:

curl -s http://mirror.cse.iitk.ac.in/ubuntu/dists/trusty/main/binary-amd64/Packages.gz | gunzip | grep -E '^(Package|Version)' | awk 'ORS=NR%2?FS:RS {print $2}' > repo-a.txt 
curl -s ftp://ftp.iitb.ac.in/distributions/ubuntu/archives/dists/trusty/main/binary-amd64/Packages.gz | gunzip | grep -E '^(Package|Version)' | awk 'ORS=NR%2?FS:RS {print $2}' > repo-b.txt 
diff repo-a.txt repo-b.txt