rmadison -- Remotely query the Debian archive database about packages
dak ls queries the Debian archive database ("projectb") and displays which package version is registered per architecture/component/suite. The CGI at http://qa.debian.org/madison.php provides that service without requiring ssh access to ftp-master.debian.org or the mirror on merkel.debian.org. This script, rmadison, is a command line frontend to this CGI.
use URL for the query. Supported shorthands are debian or qa http://qa.debian.org/madison.php (the default) bpo http://www.backports.org/cgi-bin/madison.cgi ubuntu http://people.ubuntu.com/~ubuntu-archive/madison.cgi
See the RMADISON_URL_MAP_ variable below for a method to add new shorthands.
ARCH, COMPONENT and SUITE can be comma (or space) separated lists, e.g. --architecture=m68k,i386
The two configuration files /etc/devscripts.conf and ~/.devscripts are sourced by a shell in that order to set configuration variables. Command line options can be used to override configuration file settings. Environment variable settings are ignored for this purpose. The currently recognised variables are:
Add an entry to the set of shorthand URLs listed above. SHORTHAND should be replaced with the shorthand form to be used to refer to URL.
Multiple shorthand entries may be specified by using multiple RMADISON_URL_MAP_* variables.
dak ls also supports -r, --regex to treat PACKAGE as a regex. Since that can easily DoS the database ("-r ."), this option is not supported by the CGI and rmadison.
dak ls was formerly called madison.
The protocol used by rmadison is fairly simple, the CGI accepts query the parameters a, b, c, g, G, s, S, t, and package. The parameter text is passed to enable plain-text output.
madison-lite(1), dak(1).
rmadison and http://qa.debian.org/madison.php were written by Christoph Berg <myon@debian.org>. dak was written by James Troup <james@nocrew.org>, Anthony Towns <ajt@debian.org>, and others.