Bug#232639: Does dpkg -l refer only to installed, as opposed to available, packages?

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

Package: dpkg
Version: 1.10.18
Severity: minor

On Sat, Feb 14, 2004 at 11:07:07AM +0100, Mario Vukelic wrote:
> On Sat, 2004-02-14 at 03:24, Colin Watson wrote:
> > 'dpkg -p' lists whatever's in /var/lib/dpkg/available; 'dpkg -l'
> > lists whatever's in /var/lib/dpkg/status. 
> 
> Uh, for me (dpkg 1.9.21) man says -l lists available, and -p 
> 
> dpkg  -p|--print-avail package
> 	Display details about package, as found in
> 	/var/lib/dpkg/available.
> 
> dpkg -l | --list package-name-pattern ...
> 	List packages matching given pattern. If no 
> 	package-name-pattern is given, list all packages 
> 	in /var/lib/dpkg/available.

By experimentation, this is wrong. It should say "/var/lib/dpkg/status"
for -l. (In current versions this is in the dpkg-query(8) man page
instead, but the mistake is still there.)

  $ mkdir tmp/dpkgadmin
  $ cd tmp/dpkgadmin
  $ cp /var/lib/dpkg/available /var/lib/dpkg/status .
  $ mkdir updates
  $ dpkg-query --admindir=. -l | wc -l
  796
  $ mv available available.tmp
  $ touch available
  $ dpkg-query --admindir=. -l | wc -l
  796
  $ mv available.tmp available
  $ mv status status.tmp
  $ touch status
  $ dpkg-query --admindir=. -l | wc -l
  0

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                  [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]