DOKK / manpages / debian 10 / devscripts / dcontrol.1.en
DCONTROL(1) DCONTROL(1)

dcontrol -- Query package and source control files for all Debian distributions

dcontrol queries a remote database of Debian binary and source package control files. It can be thought of as an apt-cache webservice that also operates for distributions and architectures different from the local machine.

Like apt-cache, packages can be suffixed by modifiers:

=version
Exact version match
@architecture
Query this only architecture. Use @source for source packages, @binary excludes source packages.
/[archive:][suite][/component]
Restrict to archive (debian, debian-backports, debian-security, debian-volatile), suite (always codenames, with the exception of experimental), and/or component (main, updates/main, ...). Use two slashes (//) to separate suite and component if the suite name contains slashes. (Component can be left empty.)

By default, all versions, suites, and architectures are queried. Refer to https://qa.debian.org/cgi-bin/dcontrol for currently supported values.

Add headers showing which distribution the control file is from.
Print URL queried.
Ignore all configuration files (must be the first option).
Show a help message.
Show version information.

The two configuration files /etc/devscripts.conf and ~/.devscripts are sourced by a shell in that order to set configuration variables. Command line options can be used to override configuration file settings. Environment variable settings are ignored for this purpose. The currently recognised variable is:

URL to query. Default is https://qa.debian.org/cgi-bin/dcontrol.

This program is Copyright (C) 2009 by Christoph Berg <myon@debian.org>.

This program is licensed under the terms of the GPL, either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

apt-cache(1)

2019-08-04 Debian Utilities