On Sat, 24 Feb 2007 16:41:11 +0200 "era eriksson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
0> vnix$ dlocate -s mail-transport-agent 1> Package: mail-transport-agent (virtual) 2> Providers: exim4-daemon-heavy, exim4-daemon-light, postfix, courier-mta ... 3> 4> Package: postfix 5> Status: install ok installed 6> Priority: extra 7> Section: mail Many good ideas. Adding the blank line looks better. "Providers:" is also better, as is your reordering. Duplicate fields: both line #1 and #4 begin with "Package:". The trailing "(virtual)" makes searching and parsing harder; for instance, 'sed'ing or 'grep'ing for anything in parenthesis means extra quoting. If spaces in tags are avoided, then a hyphen might do: Virtual-Package: mail-transport-agent > Not sure if Providers: should be comma-separated (cf. Depends:) or > space-separated or even pipe-separated (again, cf. how equally valid > alternatives are shown in Depends:) or what. Pipes seem ideal, since for '.deb's they mean XOR. Interesting point about 'dlocate' having its own conventions for switch syntax. Instead of '-v' then, any mnemonic suggesting 'Virtual' would do -- oddly enough, '-v' at present isn't used by 'dlocate', and 'v' is the first letter of 'virtual'. Yet having '-v', (or whatever it ought to be called, probably NOT '-v' as that would confuse users accustomed to it meaning 'verbose'), as a general tag is tricky for users who seldom know if a package is virtual until after running 'dlocate'. Maybe '-v' could fail unless the package was virtual, in which case it would output just its VP provider's 'Description:' fields. Aside from that conundrum, what we have now is: 0> % dlocate -s mail-transport-agent 1> Virtual-Package: mail-transport-agent 2> Providers: exim4-daemon-heavy | exim4-daemon-light | postfix | courier-mta ... 3> 4> Package: postfix 5> Status: install ok installed 6> Priority: extra 7> Section: mail ... HTH... -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]