On Sun, Jul 23, 2017 at 11:43:10PM +0200, Michael Soegtrop via Inkscape-devel wrote:
For Debian there are online lists with all packages and versions, e.g. https://packages.debian.org/stable/allpackages?format=txt.gz For Ubuntu the lists are e.g. https://packages.ubuntu.com/de/xenial/allpackages?format=txt.gz Mint has it as HTML: http://packages.linuxmint.com/list.php?release=Sonya Should be easy to convert with XSLT.
It should take only a few lines of Python to fetch and check these.
All of those are Debian derivates, and they share the same packaging and repository format. So it's (imho) way easier to instead get the Sources file (like https://deb.debian.org/debian/dists/stretch/main/source/Sources.xz for debian, very similar URI for the others) and use any rfc 822 parser to read it; there are also debian-specific things like a python-debian python module and a grep-dctrl thing for bash (both usuable outside of a debian environment, here "debian-specific" means they are done to parse debian (and derivative) stuff).