some questions on apt for a widget

Wingzero138 · 06-07-2005, 08:56 PM

I'm making a small superkaramba widget that will tell me when there are upgrades ready for download. I was able to use apt-show-version -u to give me the number of packages, but I was wondering if there was a way to check if there is a dist-upgrade available. I've search around with google and found nothing.

Also as a side note with it, was wondering if you know how, if it would be able to work with other Debian distros Ubuntu, Progeny, etc or with apt-rpm. Thanks in advance.

Wingzero138 · 06-08-2005, 09:57 PM

Another question, I want to make a check to see if an update of the package list can be done. Is there a file to compare to the repositories packages file, because it seems apt-get update seems to know when to actually grab the new lists and when not to, if not I'm just going to use the date on pkgcache.bin and have the widget notify when the file is more then 2 days old.

Sorry if this is the wrong forum, I wasn't sure where to go and figured that the Debian forum would know more about apt stuff then the other forums.