Bug#933609: How hard it is to find the Date of a package

A probably known easier way is to see the standardized changelog of the package.  There should be a date in each version.

Yao Wei

(This email is sent from a phone; sorry for HTML email if it happens.)

> On Aug 1, 2019, at 09:27, 積丹尼 Dan Jacobson <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Package: www.debian.org
> 
> Let's examine how extremely hard it is for a user to squeeze update date
> of a package he is thinking of installing out of the Debian system.
> 
> First of all update dates are not part of any Package* file. So forget
> apt, etc.
> 
> Now we must turn to the web.
> 
> Case in point:
> 
> "Should we install webext-ublock-origin, or get it from the Chrome web
> store. I know, let's see which is newer!" #933608
> 
> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm
> says says "Updated July 25, 2019"
> 
> That was simple.
> 
> OK, let's turn to Debian.
> 
> https://www.google.com/search?q=webext-ublock-origin leads to
> https://packages.debian.org/sid/web/webext-ublock-origin
> from where we must know to click on "all",
> https://packages.debian.org/sid/all/webext-ublock-origin/download
> 
> There we see
>  More information on webext-ublock-origin_1.19.0+dfsg-2_all.deb:
>  Exact Size    1617728 Byte (1.5 MByte)
>  MD5 checksum    190c7c66089925f72489624d700c34a0
>  SHA1 checksum    Not Available
>  SHA256 checksum    bf50b4180ba0daddd720b5ce1702a315ed7743cc749ebb3cc131fe60dcc648c9
> 
> but Date is still not included.
> 
> So we must copy a link, and run HEAD on it,
> 
> $ HEAD http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/u/ublock-origin/webext-ublock-origin_1.19.0+dfsg-2_all.deb
> 200 OK
> Connection: close
> Date: Thu, 01 Aug 2019 01:17:03 GMT
> Accept-Ranges: bytes
> ETag: "5d22808b-18af40"
> Server: nginx/1.13.6
> Content-Length: 1617728
> Content-Type: application/octet-stream
> Last-Modified: Sun, 07 Jul 2019 23:30:19 GMT
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> 
> Ah, finally!
> 
> But let's say we are not as smart.
> 
> So we must shorten the link:
> 
> http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/u/ublock-origin/
> 
> Then click Last Modified (twice), then look for the file we want...
>