Joey's Tools: Security Updates
elmo
This program is similar to James' madison but enhanced in many ways. In my opinion the output is nicer, but that's just minor. Since it can display paths and URLs of packages in various distributions it helps me with determining version numbers and source packages.
sign
This program simply signs a .dsc or .changes file and automatically appends the required trailing newline if one is required.
scansecurity
This program is supposed to scan the private security queue and report a list of packages accompanying their distribution, version and architectures. This helps a lot determining whether a package has been built for all required architectures or not.
keyring-verify
This program simply verifies the digital signature on a given .changes file. It helps a lot verifying whether a maintainer-provided package has been properly signed or whether it is corrupt. It also displays who signed the file.
difftar
This is just a wrapper around diff -Nurp, but will
work where interdiff will fail since two Debian native
packages need to be compared. This helps a lot.
diffpackages
This program is a wrapper for interdiff,
difftar and debdiff in order to provide a
report the changes between two sets of packages. It can cope with
source files, Debian packages and even .changes files (preferred
use). It helps locate missing dependencies, dirty patches and the
like. It will diff against the proper distribution, i.e. again
ststable or against security if it's available.
dpkg-approve-buildd
This program is used to approve build logs which are stored as mbox
files in a buildd directory. As of 2005 it will query
for the passphrase for the GnuPG key only once and use it on stdin of
gpg in order to keep the annoyance small when approving
50+ build logs.
dpkg-md5sum
This tools calculates the URLs and MD5 sums for packages on the security server. It is used to generate the file lists in our advisories.
dsa-launch
This program releases a security advisory for me. First it copies the advisory file to the private advisory archive on the security host, then it generates a GnuPG signature on it, and finally it embedds the advisory into a mail and sets the headers accordingly.
parse-advisory.pl
This script parses an advisory as sent via dsa-launch
and converts it to WML by creating a .data (language
independent) and .wml (spoken language) file in the
directory for the current year. The .wml files will also
be translated into other languages in order to provide the advisory
text into several languages.