repowand 🪄

repowand is a command-line utility for querying Repology's API, and is useful for users and developers who:

• Need to compare package versions and metadata between software distributions frequently.
• Require specific software on multiple PCs with different operating systems/toolchains, often needing to switch between them.
• Want to avoid maintaining a bunch of lists of the same packages for different repositories.

Getting Started

Other than Python 3, no dependencies are required to run Repowand.

 > ./repowand

 > python3 repowand

Copy or symlink repowand to a directory in your $PATH to use it anywhere.

 > # Assuming ~/.local/bin is in your $PATH, and your current directory is this repo.
 > ln -s $(realpath ./repowand) ~/.local/bin
 > repowand

Make sure repowand has executable permissions with chmod +x ./repowand

Subcommands

Simply typing repowand will just print its help message. The real magic is in these subcommands:

• repowand mklist -R repo ~/path/to/template.json can produce lists of packages matching names from any given repo(s) from a template, easily usable in package management/bootstrap scripts.

  • Advanced per-repository control of list generation is possible using regex to select both repository names and package names.
  • See mklist-example.yaml and mklist-example.json for example templates.
    • YAML configuration is only supported if you have PyYAML installed.

• repowand compare packagename list,of,fields can output package metadata from Repology in script-friendly columns. The supported fields are:

  • name: Equivalent to binname if present, or srcname if not.
  • srcname, binname: Package name(s) as used in repository - source package name and/or binary package name, whichever is applicable.
  • repo: Repository name, including distribution version if applicable.
  • subrepo: Subrepository name, if applicable. (for example, main or contrib or non-free from Debian)
  • visiblename: Package name as shown to the user by Repology.
  • version: Package version. (sanitized, as shown by Repology)
  • origversion: Package version as in repository.
  • status: Package status. (newest, devel, unique, outdated, legacy, rolling, noscheme, incorrect, untrusted, ignored)
  • summary: One-line description of the package.
  • categories: List of categories for the package.
  • licenses: List of licenses for the package.
  • maintainers: List of package maintainers.

Flags

These all apply to both subcommands.

• -R REPOS, --repos REPOS: Specify repository(s) to search for packages in. Required for mklist.
• -c, --ignore-cached: Re-download package data, even if it's cached.
• -q, --count-api-queries: Show the total number of API queries when the program exits.

License

Copyright (c) 2024 Amber Connelly

This software is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE.txt for details.