On Mon, Nov 15, 2004 at 01:54:19PM +0000, Brian Nelson wrote: > What dpkg does is broken. It has no business storing that stuff in the > status file.
Now you're echoing Colin Watson. WHY is it that it has no business storing that information in the status file? A package's installation state should be there, but its hold state should not? Oh, by all means, we should have to look in more than one place for information about the state of the package. Not. As for it being broken, dpkg is the fundamental package installation tool. If its behavior is broken, heaven help Debian. If its behavior needs to be changed, then by all means, let it be changed. > Consider aptitude to be, errr, "ahead of its time". Consider aptitude to be attempting to define a new standard. Will dpkg begin honoring what aptitude does? It hasn't so far. > dselect and apt-get are both dead-end tools whose development was > largely halted long ago. If you rely on them to define the "standard", > you're never going to get anywhere. I don't rely on dselect and apt-get to define the standard, I rely on dpkg to define the standard. Dselect and apt-get follow that standard, aptitude does not, hence aptitude is broken, or at least should not be promoted as a replacement for tools that DO. Can aptitude rebuild the available file? No, I didn't think so. Guess dselect isn't all that useless. I understand perfectly well why everyone fawns over aptitude... it's "dselect backlash". > > If aptitude is *inconsistent*, as it is between the command line > > and the ncurses interface, it's WORSE. > > The command-line is an after-thought in aptitude. It's not intended to > be used as the primary interface and is not as well supported. That is not a reason for its behavior to be different. Why does dependency resolution depend on the interface presented to the user? Please provide a reference for your claims regarding the command-line interface being a second-class citizen. According to the changelog, it's been there for over two years, and is continuing to be enhanced (changelog entries for 2004 refer to it). If it's not going to be supported, it should be ripped out again. Apparently you think enough of the command-line capability to contribute to official documentation promoting its use over other tools. This is... confusing. > The inconsistency is a known bug, and it'll be fixed some day. It's not > a high priority though, and certainly isn't something that should > prevent aptitude's use at all. Considering the maintainer's attitude, it's unlikely it'll ever be fixed at all. Why it's there to begin with.... -- Marc Wilson | The best cure for insomnia is to get a lot of [EMAIL PROTECTED] | sleep. -W.C. Fields -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
