rmadison alternative 'pkg-versions'

[Bryce Harrington]

A few people have mentioned having problems using rmadison recently, and
enquired about a little reimplementation I made a bit ago.  I figure in
case others are interested I'd throw out a PSA about it:

    https://git.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-server/+git/ubuntu-helpers/tree/bryce/pkg-versions

It is a lot faster (for me) than rmadison, because it pulls data from
qa.debian.org rather than people.canonical.com; the former server is in
the PNW near me.  European folks have not seen this performance benefit,
so YMMV.

The script is written in Bash, rather than Perl as rmadison is.  It
requires curl and distro-info as dependencies, but those should already
be on everyone's system, so you should be able to plop the script
somewhere in your $PATH, and go.

I've also changed the default output to be more immediately useful for
my own needs:  It includes Debian package versions, and excludes older
ESM releases.  Example output:

    $ pkg-versions dovecot
    ### Debian ###
    dovecot | 1:2.3.19.1+dfsg1-2.1+deb12u1 | bookworm-security
    dovecot | 1:2.3.19.1+dfsg1-2.1+deb12u1 | bookworm
    dovecot | 1:2.3.21.1+dfsg1-1~bpo12+1   | bookworm-backports
    dovecot | 1:2.3.21.1+dfsg1-1           | trixie
    dovecot | 1:2.3.21.1+dfsg1-1           | sid
    dovecot | 1:2.4.0+dfsg1-1~exp3         | experimental
    dovecot | 1:2.4.0+dfsg1-1~exp4         | experimental

    ### Ubuntu ###
    dovecot | 1:2.3.7.2-1ubuntu3           | focal
    dovecot | 1:2.3.7.2-1ubuntu3.7         | focal-security
    dovecot | 1:2.3.7.2-1ubuntu3.7         | focal-updates
    dovecot | 1:2.3.16+dfsg1-3ubuntu2      | jammy
    dovecot | 1:2.3.16+dfsg1-3ubuntu2.4    | jammy-security
    dovecot | 1:2.3.16+dfsg1-3ubuntu2.4    | jammy-updates
    dovecot | 1:2.3.21+dfsg1-2ubuntu5      | noble
    dovecot | 1:2.3.21+dfsg1-2ubuntu6      | noble-security
    dovecot | 1:2.3.21+dfsg1-2ubuntu6      | noble-updates
    dovecot | 1:2.3.21.1+dfsg1-1ubuntu1    | oracular
    dovecot | 1:2.3.21.1+dfsg1-1ubuntu2    | plucky

There's just one command line option, --devel, which limits to just the
devel release and debian, useful for checking for new syncs/merges:

    $ ~/bin/pkg-versions openldap --devel
    openldap | 2.5.19+dfsg-1            | sid
    openldap | 2.6.9+dfsg-2             | sid
    openldap | 2.6.9+dfsg-1~exp2ubuntu1 | plucky


It's pretty bare bones beyond that; I've not implemented the many other
options and functionalities that rmadison provides.  Patches are welcome
though, and I'll take feature requests.  There's been one request to add
support for looking up binary packages.

Anyway, hope pkg-versions is helpful and I'd love to hear if it is.

Bryce