How to create a command, on Ubuntu, to report when the latest version of a given package was released?
(I need to check this as part of proving that we install certain updates on certain servers within a given time.)
Right now, my script does the following:
- issue
apt-cache policy <packagename>
- extract the repository URLs for the latest version
- issue
apt-cache show <packagename>
- extract the URL path for the latest version
- concatenate them
- issue a HTTP HEAD request for the resulting URLs
- report the Last-Modified header value
This assumes the local index is up to date (i.e. sudo apt-get update
or equivalent has been run recently enough). That is fine with me.
Apart from that assumption, how reliable is this? Is there a better way?