On Sun, 25 Feb 2007 02:26:20 -0500, "A. Costa" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > 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.
Well, my reasoning was exactly that somebody might do "| grep ^Package:" and miss the fact that a package is virtual. But I guess we can accept that, in favor of having unique field names (and anyway, most lusers are too lazy or ignorant to include the ^ anchor anyway :^) > > 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. Well, they clutter the output, and don't really add anything. Just a whitespace separator makes the data easier to cut and paste. I'm not at all really sure how to prioritize this. > Interesting point about 'dlocate' having its own conventions for > switch syntax. Instead of '-v' then, any mnemonic suggesting > 'Virtual' would do I humbly suggest '-virtual' to go with the other full-length options (-conf, -lsconf, -md5sum, -md5check, -man -- these have a single hyphen, too) ... Or simply replacing the current option processing with something a little less insane, but that would entail breaking backwards compatibility. Privately, I've been toying with the idea to create a competing package which straightens out some of dlocate's quirks. Unfortunately, I'm afraid I can't commit to being a more active maintainer than the current (non-)maintainer of dlocate. /* era */ -- If this were a real .signature, it would suck less. Well, maybe not. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
