#991578 aptitude: document state indicator letters more clearly

Package:
aptitude
Source:
aptitude
Description:
terminal-based package manager
Submitter:
Greg Wooledge
Date:
2021-07-28 12:45:03 UTC
Severity:
wishlist
Tags:
#991578#5
Date:
2021-07-27 19:34:03 UTC
From:
To:
This patch improves the documentation of the state indicator letters, used
in the output of the "search" and "why" actions.
#991578#10
Date:
2021-07-28 08:06:45 UTC
From:
To:
Hi Greg,

Greg Wooledge wrote:

Thanks a lot, this indeed looks like an improvement!

From my mind there are also some more possible states, which seem not
to be documented in the manual at all on a first glance. IIRC these
are:

H or h = on hold
U or u = unpacked, but not configured, e.g. if the configure step in
         the previous run failed.
B      = broken (dependencies are not fullfilled)
F      = forbidden version

Except for "B" I'm not sure if they're lower or upper case, but that
should be easy to check.

IIRC those letters follow the letters in the first three columns of
the "dpkg -l" output where usually bad. (Except for "A" and "F" which
dpkg doesn't know about.)

And then I vaguely remember that dpkg also knows the state
"half-installed" which is worse than "unconfigured" and usually
requires to purge the package first before reinstalling it. But I
forgot the letter for it. Maybe the capital H.

		Regards, Axel
#991578#17
Date:
2021-07-28 11:46:59 UTC
From:
To:
For whatever reason, the aptitude developers did not include all of
the state letters in the man page.  They only included the "most
common" ones, even though the example right above that section includes
a letter that isn't in their list ("h").

This patch only moves things around within the man page.  I didn't add
any additional content, because I was going for a minimalist change.

A larger set of state letters is documented at
<https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/aptitude/ch02.en.html> (more
specifically, <https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/aptitude/ch02s02s02.en.html>)
which I *think* is what the man page is referring to when it talks about an
"aptitude reference manual" or "reference guide".

I don't know whether that's a complete set either.

The developers chose to keep that information out of the man page,
and I didn't want to step on any toes, so I kept it out of my patch
as well.  If the developers would like the full set of state letters to
be documented in the man page, I would definitely welcome that.
#991578#22
Date:
2021-07-28 12:40:54 UTC
From:
To:
Hi Greg,

Greg Wooledge wrote:

Ah, didn't notice this was in the man page and not the complete
manual.

Hehe.

Yeah, I'm aware of it. I just used your bug report as reminder that
this part might need some more care on top of your patch.

Yes. Thanks for the pointer that we have them already in the manual.

Looks complete on a first glance. *phew* :-)

Yeah, in the man page this might make sense.

As mentioned before, my mail was no critic on your patch. Just an
addendum for us Aptitude maintainers.

Thanks for sharing your opinion on that!

		Regards, Axel