DebFile: Python Library for Inspecting .deb

A couple of days ago Mike Hommey blogged about "coincidences" in free software development: more than one developers are likely to have the same crazy ideas.

It happened to me and Filippo last Friday. While writing the script for maintaining the OCaml status page I faced, unsuccessfully, the need of a library for extracting meta-information and actual content out of .debs of incoming. While I was getting sad for the lack of such a (Python) library Filippo contacted me on Jabber stating something like «you know what? ... a cool addition for python-debian would be a library for querying .deb files ...»

A few days later we have something working and fitting our (disjoint) needs (it's a branch of the python-debian package which includes two brand new modules: arfile.py and debfile.py):

$ bzr branch http://people.debian.org/~zack/bzr/pkg-python-debian/

Here are some examples to wet your appetite:

• changelog head.py
• dpkg-info.py
• extract cron.py
• ar.py

It is already a proposed addition to python-debian, feel free to comment about the API ... before it's too late

Update: starting from version 0.1.4, arfile.py and debfile.py have been integrated into python-debian