Bug#33394: not a bug?

[Julian Gilbey <jdg@debian.org>]

On Wed, Oct 02, 2002 at 02:11:11PM +0200, Wichert Akkerman wrote:
> Previously Julian Gilbey wrote:
> > If I recall correctly, the default status for a new package used to be
> > "hold ok not-installed", whereas it is currently "purge ok
> > not-installed".
> 
> I highly doubt that. If so that is years and years ago and certainly no
> longer relevant.

Let's see....

polya:~ $ grep-status -F Status "hold ok not-installed" -s Package | wc -l
   1942

Hmm, that's 1942 entries in the status file which have this status.
That makes it certainly still relevant for me.

(Incidentally, it seems that the change to dpkg's behaviour happened
around 1998, so it was years and years ago, but stuff like this has a
habit of sticking around for a *long* time.)

One possibility of cleaning up this properly might be to have dpkg
internally convert "hold ok not-installed" to "purge ok not-installed"
so that the next time the status file is updated by dpkg, there are no
more entries with this status.  This code would only need to exist for
sarge (or possibly also sarge+1), for after that, everyone who's
followed Debian release-by-release will have had their status files
upgraded.

   Julian

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      Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, Queen Mary, Univ. of London
              website: http://www.maths.qmul.ac.uk/~jdg/
   Debian GNU/Linux Developer, see: http://people.debian.org/~jdg/
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