Re: Punctuation characters in Debian packaging
> On 04 Nov 2014, at 18:38, Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
>
> The Wanderer writes ("Re: Punctuation characters in Debian packaging"):
>> On 11/04/2014 at 12:12 PM, Ian Jackson wrote:
>>> apt-get seems to prefer actual package names to ones resulting from
>>> stripping `+' (which is also IMO a bug).
>>
>> Can you explain why this would be considered a bug? It seems to produce
>> the desired behavior in every case I've been able to think of so far.
>
> apt's interpretation of ordinary command lines should not depend on
> the (non-)existence of particular packages.
>
> If it does, then it is not possible to reliably unparse the command
> line.
In the current collection of packages we have wmweather and wmweather+ as an
example, both available in oldstable through unstable.
Moreover, there could be any number of package names being used in local
repositories maintained within organisations. If they are not careful they
might trip over this issue.
As the author and maintainer of aptitude-robot I rely on the feature (of
aptitude in this particular case) to be able to add a plus, minus, or a few
other supported character combination. However, I do not care what the
characters are as I am passing them through as is.
There are a few considerations that I care about:
* I fully support that the interpretation of command lines should not depend
on the (non-)existence of particular packages
* I do not particularly care which way the ambiguity is resolved. Either
some characters are banned from appearing at the end of package names
(this would affect quite a few packages) or the modifiers supported are
changed (with probably fewer affected packages).
* If the modifiers are changed then apt and aptitude should support the
same characters as long as the semantics is the same and use different
characters when the semantics is different.
* This change should preferably be well coordinated. The freeze period
for jessie seems a risky time to “fix” this. There are probably quite
a few scripts around that rely on these modifiers (scripts more so than
command line habbits...).
Just my two cents — Elmar
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