Get changelog information from RPM and DEB package

Here is a nice Linux tip: to get change information of some RPM package it’s enough to execute the following command rpm -q –changelog package for example rpm -q –changelog openssh will output something like:


* Fri Mar 03 2006 Tomas Mraz <[email protected]> - 4.3p2-4
- allow access if audit is not compiled in kernel (#183243)</[email protected]>

* Sat Feb 25 2006 Tomas Mraz <[email protected]> – 4.3p2-3
– enable the subprocess in chroot to send messages to system log
– sshd should prevent login if audit call fails</[email protected]>

* Wed Feb 22 2006 Tomas Mraz <[email protected]> – 4.3p2-2
– print error from scp if not remote (patch by Bjorn Augustsson #178923)</[email protected]>

…

* Sat Oct 30 1999 Damien Miller <[email protected]>
– Back to old binary names</[email protected]>

* Fri Oct 29 1999 Damien Miller <[email protected]>
– Use autoconf
– New binary names</[email protected]>

* Thu Oct 28 1999 Damien Miller <[email protected]>
– Initial RPMification, based on Jan “Yenya” Kasprzak’s <[email protected]> spec.
</[email protected]></[email protected]>

To look through whole output it would be useful to use more or less commands:
rpm -q –changelog /path/to/package.rpm | less

Similar command is available also in Debian: dpkg-parsechangelog. It reads and parses the changelog of an unpacked Debian source tree and outputs the information in it to standard output in a machine-readable form.